SEM meets SEO

Ninety-nine percent of Google’s revenue comes from pay-per-click advertising. While Overture (now Yahoo Search Marketing) came up with the PPC advertising model first, Google elevated it to a whole new level of success.

Many companies would sit back and watch the dollars roll in. But not Google. They’ve never stopped introducing changes to the Adwords system. And their latest announcement takes paid advertising in a new direction.

On December 8th, Google announced the following:

“Today, we started incorporating a new factor into the Quality Score -- the landing page -- which will look at the content and layout of the pages linked from your ads.”
(source: http://adwords.blogspot.com/2005/12/new-addition-to-quality-score.html)

I find this latest change surprising for several reasons.

It’s the first time that I can think of where there has been a clear merge of paid advertising and organic optimization. Presumably Google will use the same technology it uses (to crawl, analyze, index and measure websites) organically to determine the ‘quality’ of a landing page, thus impacting paid campaigns.

Previously, search marketers didn’t need to know how to organically optimize a website in order to run a good paid campaign, and vice versa. Now, both skill-sets will be involved in paid campaign strategy and tactics. Sophisticated bid management and landing page testing tools will also have to become that much more sophisticated in order to take landing page quality into account.

Google’s intention is good – they want to ensure that clicking on their ads provides the person doing the clicking with a relevant and rewarding user experience. As long as people continue to find value in Google’s ads, Google will be able to sustain or grow the Adwords business.

However, this change makes search marketing that much more complex (and it’s already up there on the complexity scale to begin with). And unfortunately, anything that makes search marketing more complicated also makes it more time intensive and overhead heavy.

As a search marketer, this might seem to be a good thing for me (more demand for my services), but it’s not – I want to make sure that as much of a clients’ ad budget goes to their media buy – not to paying for my time – because at the end of the day ROI is what will determine whether their venture into search marketing is a successful one or not.

The second reason this announcement deserves some attention is because it comes as yet another reminder of how much power Google has, and how much its rules dictate the way so many other companies run their businesses and how they are able to market to clients and consumers.

Google has always had rules around the kind of content allowed on advertisers’ websites. (You can read their content policy here: https://adwords.google.com/select/contentpolicy.html); they also have extensive editorial guidelines around their ads (here: https://adwords.google.com/select/guidelines.html).

They’ve also ventured into dictating the type of user experience someone should have once they hit an advertiser site (for example, the site cannot have pop-up windows and the back button must work).

But this is the first time that they have ventured into penalizing advertisers for a landing page experience that is less than ‘quality’ (as defined by Google).

So far on the blogs and forums that I’ve looked at the response from search marketers has been primarily negative. Here’s an example of one discussion about this announcement: http://www.threadwatch.org/node/4960#comment-30616.

As one contributer writes, “I'm paying the freakin' money, show the godarned ad already.”

But perhaps ‘JimBeetle’ sums up the situation even more clearly, as he writes:

“Google has over reached before, but now it's telling folks how to run their businesses? Why can't the folks at the Plex see the not so fine lines they're stomping over. What next? Let's see. How 'bout the New York Times instituting new ad rules: Make sure your sidewalk is swept and the windows washed; make sure the advertised product is prominently displayed in the store window; make sure you greet the customer with a resounding, "Good morning, Madam." If not, you'll pay a premium to advertise.”