Search Marketing: Google Does it While Learning
|
Written By Noah Mallin | July 7, 2008 | Share This
|
|
Back in the late 90s the only thing we worried about in the White House was a certain dry cleaning bill and a gentleman’s proper cigar etiquette. Yes, times were different. Back then Microsoft was perceived by some as the next great monopoly, with Bill Gates as Cornelius Vanderbilt ready to dominate the desktops of every man, woman, child, and wildebeest. Now in the aught-ies the focus of the Justice department and armchair alarmists alike is Google and Bill Gates has retired to live the life of a full-time philanthropist.
Today’s New York Times has a great story by Steve Lohr comparing the two companies and the baton pass that has occurred. As Reprise Media’s Senior Vice President of Business Development Dan Kashman pointed out to me this morning, the most interesting nugget here are the search-specific methods that Google has used to grow and solidify its industry leadership position. Through harvesting their rich load of data from search and then their ancillary products Google has managed to stay nimble and innovative. As Google’s Chief Economist Hal R. Varian says in the article,” The source of Google’s competitive advantage is learning by doing…”
A number of their recent announcements have been the direct result of their strategic experimentation, data harvesting, and improvement philosophy — AdPlanner and Flash crawling anyone? The GooHoo deal is simply the culmination of this masterful strategy.
The nature of experimentation is that not everything Google has tried has worked, far from it. Their Picasa web image hosting has been less than a runaway success and their Blogger blogging platform hasn’t knocked WordPress out of the market. Let’s not forget Google Finance which has failed to take a bite out of one of Yahoo’s strongest features. What these and Google Maps, the YouTube purchase, and iGoogle have in common is Google’s desire to learn about how disparate online activities tie in to their main search business. Sometimes the connection- as with AdWords - becomes a tremendously powerful revenue generator. Other times, it’s an imperfect fit with Google’s overall model, but in each case they have the opportunity to learn something about the behavior of their users and are able to adjust accordingly.
Search marketing can function as a microcosm of this, allowing a brand to experiment fine-tune and hone their message while getting back a slew of relevant data.
One of the things that sets search marketing apart form other forms of marketing is the availability of in-depth data and the ability to quickly respond and continually tweak your campaigns to take new information into account. Varian’s description of Google’s strategy doubles as a description of a good search marketing campaign “The system is constantly evolving to optimize efficiency, improve ad quality and make the pricing smarter, so you don’t want set rules that say we do X and we don’t do Y…”
As a marketer this can mean experimenting with the effect of widgets on organic results, brand keywords versus generic keywords or geo-targeted copy versus universal copy to name just a few. The web is a dynamic marketplace — sitting still on what seems to be a winning strategy while your competitors experiment and refine their approach based on hard data just won’t cut it. Ask Jerry Yang.
As smart as Google has been though, it’s also important not to get too bogged down in data analysis. Remember, data is only useful if you stay flexible enough to act quickly. Google’s obsessive compulsive focus on not adding a single word to their homepage added wasteful time to the implementation of a simple link to their privacy policy. Maintaining the “weight” of their homepage at 28 words seems a mite ill-considered as months have gone by and privacy concerns have multiplied. This was a classic case of not seeing the forest for the trees.
Topics: Google, Microsoft, Reprise Media, SEM: Paid Search, SEO, Uncategorized, Web Analytics, Yahoo! |