Is Google Waging A Cold War On Savvy Paid Search Marketers?
Lately, there has been a lot of talk about Google’s diminishing search result quality with the introduction of Search Plus Your World. Many have accused Google of forcing users and advertisers into its Google+ ecosystem. With the new social network struggling and its engagement metrics, like time spent on site, dropping, such accusations have a lot of merit.
However, there have been a number of less-discussed moves the company has made recently in the paid search space that warrant as much, if not more, of marketers’ attention. For several quarters now, investors have been questioning Google on dropping average cost per click. While revenue has been steadily increasing, year over year CPC has dropped 12%. Google has been quick to dismiss this phenomenon as a lift in overall advertiser performance with improvement in quality scores. Whatever the case may be, as a public company, the trend must be turning up pressure on its main revenue stream.
Perhaps as a response to its investors, Google has been quietly implementing changes to its AdWords offering. Presented as improvements, these changes have clearly been designed to maximize revenue and potential drive up the average CPC.
Broader Exact and Phrase Match
Google is famous for giving advertisers unprecedented control over their AdWords campaigns. With a wide selection of positive and negative match types, savvy marketers can zero in on the most profitable terms. However, as many advertisers moved away from using broad match type, Google was likely left with a lot of unsold inventory. So in mid-April, the company announced “improved” exact and phrase match types, which starting in mid-May will begin matching to close variants, misspellings, and other less-relevant search queries.
Many advertisers will benefit from this change but those professional marketers who run more sophistical account structures will have less control over their campaigns. With more advertisers automatically matching to longer tail queries and misspellings, CPCs for such niches of efficiency are likely to rise.
Limits On Even Ad Rotation
The second punch came in late April, when Google announced that even ad rotation setting will revert back to optimized rotation after only 30 days. Again, there are some less-savvy advertisers that will benefit from this, as they might not have the best ads in rotation. However, many search marketers have comprehensive split testing plans in place and are diligent about running well-optimized creatives. Since optimized rotation settings in AdWords tends to favor higher CPC creative, once again, CPCs are likely to increase for many accounts. What’s worse, unlike with the broadened match types, this feature has no opt-out option.
YouTube TrueView
Lastly, Google has been pushing hard its new set of YouTube offerings. Let’s be clear, tts rebranded TrueView ad units are a great way to reach a large and engaged audience. Google is also hard at work on adding original content, making YouTube even more attractive to large brands. However, while older ad units, like the rebranded Promoted Videos ads, operate on eCPC basis (converted from cost per view), newer pre-roll options exist on a parallel platform with no easy way of calculating CPC. Since most paid search marketers operate on the cost per click model, the end result is loss of measurability and transparency.
With these recent moves in the paid search space, search marketers should be concerned. While far from evil, Google is no longer an idealistic, privately-held organization. As a public company, Google is facing new pressures and it has already shown willingness to make sacrifices in its core search business. Google should be urged to reconsider its recent decisions since losing trust of its major evangelists might hurt its future prospects far more than a dropping cost per click ever could.
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