Search Advertising: Is Google Using the Election to Set Up an Advertising Searchtatorship?
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Written By Noah Mallin | August 21, 2008 | Share This
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Google has made a big to-do over several election related product launches lately – most recently with their dedicated Power Readers section of Google Reader that aggregates stories handpicked by Obama and McCain’s campaigns (what, no Bob Barr and Nader?) as well as high-profile political reporters. There is also a Google Maps election maps mash-up thingamajig. Naturally Google wants to make sure the public at large and not just us residents of Searchistan know about it so they’ve gone and advertised some of these offerings on their search results pages against generic election search terms. So, public service right?
Well… far be it from me to bite the hand that feeds. Quite literally, as I had lunch at the Googleplex company cafeteria in New York today. I can heartily recommend the Caesar salad which was very fresh with an excellent crispy crouton ratio and a flavorful dressing. The special Moroccan short ribs were exceedingly tender as well but I digress…
As I walked through the halls of the Google Fortress of Searchitude, past Lego Empire State Buildings and what looked like a Lego portrait of Sergey Brin’s face in progress whilst happy Googleployees scootered past me with waves and smiles, I reflected on my conversation from earlier in the day with Reprise Media Senior Account Director Chase Wells. Chase pointed out that Google owned the top two positions (one on the left as seen below and one on the right) in the Sponsored Links for the search query “Campaign Updates.”
“Yeah, and?” I replied.
“Google is trying to keep people in their own network and not on other sites,” he retorted.
“Hating Google is like hating America,” I replied. ”Their motto is ‘Do no evil’ – why do you hate America man?”
Chase shook his head sadly at me and said “Why are they forfeiting CPC (cost per click) money they could get by driving people to advertiser’s sites…”
There is a popular meme making the rounds that Google wants to put publishers out of business online and cut out the middleman – serving up ads to advertisers on their own Google properties and keeping users within the Googlesphere online where they can be tracked and marketed to more effectively and profitably.
I tried out some high ranking search terms (“obama campaign”, “mccain campaign” etc.) related to the 2008 Presidential campaign to see how far Google is taking this – the answer? Not very. In most instances I didn’t see any other ads for Google’s new areas.
Interestingly, the search term that Chase first noticed this on – “campaign updates” — barely ranks compared to the other terms I tried out, so Google isn’t loosing particularly much CPC value. Conversely they also aren’t driving nearly as many people as they would with more popular terms. It’s not as if they set up a hot tipsy female celeb alert hub and locked up adspace on the terms “Paris Hilton” and “Lindsay Lohan.”
They also don’t seem to be getting a huge amount of organic results from these dedicated Google sites on the terms I tried, even on their own engine. Higher organic results would be a much more effective way of keeping people in your orbit without having to give up that sweet CPC moolah.
What seems more likely is that this is an in-house experiment for them to get a better feel from the client side of how their search ad system is working, how it’s driving clicks and how that’s affected by different placements. What at first might have looked like an incestuous way to keep users within Google’s properties, the truth is that it will probably enhance the advertiser and the user experience for Google to play around with their own advertising in a limited way.
Topics: Advertising: Distribution, Advertising: Online, Google, Google: AdWords, Reprise Media, SEM: Paid Search |
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