Search News: Google Behavioral Targeting, but Not For Search
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Written By Noah Mallin | March 11, 2009 | Share This
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True Story: I’m at a party a few months ago – not the usual raucous affair that us search and social media types get into but a full on wine and cheese extravaganza. The kind of shindig Republicans go to and then accuse Democrats of loving when they get up in front of a “Joe the Plumber” type crowd. But I digress…
After far too much wine the discussion turned to crazy work environments and I naturally brought up the Fortress of Googletude and it’s predilection for hallway scooter parking and riding. A fellow party-go-er who I’ll call “Natasha” to protect her identity, nodded and said, ‘Yes it’s true, I’ve been there too!”
This led to a long, room-clearing talk about search and social media, the kind of talk that true geeks engage in while their spouses go off to chat about politics and religion. Somewhere between bottles Natasha said to me “Have you seen Google People Search?” “Google what now?” I replied.
She went on to describe an internally searchable database that the Google folks showed her of people sorted by interests and web habits, ready to be rolled out to advertisers at some point in the future. Thank goodness for the red wine clause in their NDA.
Well the future arrived today, at least partially, with Google’s announcement that behavioral targeting is being rolled out to the AdWords content network. As the Googlelords put it:
“With interest-based advertising, you will be able to reach users based on your past interactions with them, such as their visits to your website. We’ll also provide interest categories, such as “sports enthusiasts,” so you can reach the audience of your choice. Whether your goal is to drive brand awareness or increase responses to your ads, these capabilities can help expand the success of your campaigns.”
This is a most effective riposte to the OPA’s announcement of new, ludicrous banner ad standards - why futz around with annoying crap no-one will click on when you can target users with incredible precision?
More importantly it speaks to one of the strengths of the search ad channel – good keyword development (assuming you are doing this well) makes the issue of behavioral targeting in search moot. More importantly, while Google is keen to offer lots of configuration options to advertisers around this new process when dealing with their content network, they are unlikely to do so when it comes to search ads.
As Reprise Media Account Manager Sean McDonald pointed out to me, it’s in Google’s interest not to allow advertisers to target too well in search. As much as they want to build relevance, they also want to provide options for users and crucially, get multiple clicks for each reply page (to make more moolah.) Even if they tried to charge extra to advertisers for BT options, the response would (or should) be to simply use the long tail more effectively to control costs.
That being said, I do think they will find ways to work this database into their search algorithm even if at this point it’s unlikely search advertisers will want or be offered the option to configure their campaigns with this data.
Questions or comments? Feel free to leave them here or check out Reprise Media folks on Twitter.
Topics: Advertising: Behavioral, Advertising: Online, Google: AdWords, SEM: Keyword Generation, SEM: Paid Search |
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