What google instant search does is : 1) to predict what queries you are willing to type when you start typing and 2) to display results in real time as soon as you start typing. If you want a closer look at how it behaves you can check it at www.google.com/instant.
While we still don’t know exactly what the impact of this new feature is, here are some hints regarding the likely impact on PPC campaigns. Those hints come from different sources listed at the end of this post.

Impression count :

Source : Google Adwords Blog

Here is how google will count impressions.

An impression will be counted if :
- The user hits the « enter » key
- The user clicks on the « search » button
- The user clicks on a link in the result page
- The user stops typing for three or more seconds

Impressions will therefore increase

Search Queries : Long Tail Effect

While the google suggestion feature that suggest queries was a very good thing to push long tail keywords. The fact that results are now displayed in real time could limit the use of long tail keywords.
Indeed, if a user plan to type « paris hotel comparison » and start typing « paris h » and finds a link that interests him based on google instant result for the suggested query « paris hotel », the user might not continue and use « comparison » in his query.

More Control to Google

Source : EF Blog

The fact that the real time results are based on what google suggests, it tempts the user to click on results suggested by google, therefore increasing google’s control.

Brand Keywords appearing more in Suggested terms

Source : EF Blog

Google seems to be giving more distribution for Brand Keywords than other. When you type « tr » the first suggested term is « travelocity » and not « travel » which should clearly be more popular.

That distribution bias will have an effect on :

- Trafic Distribution
- Quality Score (if impressions goes up for started queries that where not intended to be branded queries, Brand Impressions will go up and CTR down impacting negatively the QS)

Super Short Tail

Source : Black Hat PPC

The guys at black hat PPC suggested that Google Instant is an opportunity for super short keywords. For example, you could buy « tr » as a keyword if your brand is travelocity based on the fact that google will suggest « travelocity » and display results accordingly.
While it make sense in some ways, I am not sure that google will identify « tr » as the real search term and map it back to the keyword « tr ». I rather think that google will report « travelocity » as the search term and map it to the same keyword.

Those are several hints, let’s see what the data will say in a few weeks.

Related Articles :
Official Announcement: Google Instant: A More Innovative Approach to Search
Dr. Siddharth Shah / EF Blog : Google Instant: Potential Implications for the Advertiser
Black Hatt PPC : Google Instant Search: Arise the “super short tail” keyword

If you want to learn more about this revolution in the Display world, join us on the 23rd of September at e-commerce, room S1 at 16.45. You can register now by following this link: register

Looks to me like it is very complete and an intresting read. Congrats to scores.org and byjess.net for puting this together

Research by Scores.org

What’s the Modified Broad Match

First let’s quickly recap what broad, phrase and exact match types are all about:

With the table above you will have understand that the Broad Match type will not give you a lot of control on the queries you are being matched to.

The modified broad match targeting is basically a broad match with more control. It gives the ability to have a keyword in broad match but limit the scope of this broad match to certain terms contained in your keyword and at the same time it is not as restrictive as Broad or Phrase.

How it works

To activate it you just need to buy your keyword in broad match and add a “+” in front of the term for which you want to restrict the broad matching to plurals and misspellings.

Pro’s

1. Control over your ads and landing pages relevancy

With Google broad match type getting broader and broader, this option will give you all the controls you need to ensure well-targeted ads and landing pages. What’s more frustrating than having a page dedicated to Italy but not using it because all “flights to italy” queries are being broad matched to your “flight to Rome” keywords that have a better QS and a higher CPC?

2. Control your investment

While broad matching is a pretty nice option to ensure that you have as much traffic as you can, it represents a risk in terms of performance measurement and CPC adjustment. Let’s take an example of queries that can be broad matched to “flight to Rome” and their performances over a certain timeframe

You can easily see that, the negative performance of the queries “Flight to Milan” and “Flight to Italy” are clearly affecting and screwing the data for the keyword “flight to Rome” on which the CPA (in exact match) is 20 euros. Compare this to the 28,92 euros that you think you have due to non-requested queries being matched to it and you will directly understand why more restrictive match type are useful.

By knowing the true value of a keyword you will be able to distribute your budget in the most efficient way.

3. Scale your campaigns easily

The major drawback of using negative keywords to control your traffic is the amount of work it requires. Let’s take an easy example; if you have 10 adgroups (one destination you cover), you want to include all destinations in all adgroups as a negative excepted the destination covered by each individual adgroup. So with 10 adgroups you end up having 10*9 = 90 negative keywords. Now imagine you are a big travel company with 400 destinations, that’s 400*399 = 159 600 negative keywords. Now, if you are detailed and you have variation of each adgroup per destination, let’s say one for lastminute, one for cheap and one for more generic terms, that is 400*3*399 = 478 800 negative keywords to have. Add to that the fact that google limits the number of keywords in each account at 1 million and you will quickly ends up with an issue of scalability.

The modified broad match will help you limit the number of negative keywords needed and therefore help you scale your campaigns easily.

Con’s

1. Limit you visibility

It is common practice to use modified broad match targeting as a starting point in order to collect Search Queries Data and then use those data to enrich your keywords listing (and to add negative keywords). If you don’t use modified broad keywords well, you might end up by not having visibility anymore on those queries and therefore limit the possibility of increasing your keywords reach.

For example, you know for sure that you don’t want to appear on “Cheap Flight to Italy” when you are buying the term “Cheap Flight to Rome”. But, as you don’t have “discount” keywords for Rome, you still want to appear on the query “Discount Flight to Rome”.

If you don’t use modified broad match well and use this keywords “+Cheap +Flight to +Rome” you will end up loosing the query “Discount Flight to Rome”. To avoid this you should us: “Cheap Flight to +Rome” which will leave some freedom to “Cheap Flight To” but will restrict “Rome” to misspellings and plurals.

Conclusion

In my opinion the “modified broad” match type is an excellent new feature that will help search marketers target more precisely their traffic and therefore be more relevant while remaining able to scale their campaigns and gain a lot of time. On the other hand, if not used well, it could result in complete blindness towards queries that could have been added as keywords and increase your reach.

It is definitely a good additional match type but you should take your time and think about the consequences it can have before implementing it.

Feel free to post your comments below if you agree, disagree or want to complete this post.

It is important to note that while you will be able to buy trademarked terms as keyword you will still not be allowed to include trademarked terms in your adcopy.

Google will also bring one major modification to it’s UK Trademark policy on the 14 of September. Starting on that date you will be able to use trademarked terms in you adcopy.

You can find more information about this change and the likely effects it will have on my company’s blog

The original communication from Google is available here

Instead of launching an all touch sensitive computer or super expensive living room touch table (ie Microsoft Surface), Apple is slowly changing it’s customer habits by educating them to use their fingers as input devices. It started with laptop trackpads, then keyboards got slimmer and only requesting a tiny pressure, followed by iPhone & iPod Touch Sensitive Screens. After that the iPad was released and now the Desktop Mac has it’s own touch input device that can literally replace the mouse.

While Apple could simply have replaced the mouse by the Magic Trackpad, they have chosen to launch the product and see how people adopt it, but they are getting prepared to replace the mouse. Guess what, the new iMac keyboard box has an empty space that fits exactly the Magic Trackpad size. It won’t be long before the Magic Trackpad become the default pointing device on all Mac.

To be honest I have bought a Magic Mouse and it is definitely the best mouse I ever had but I do want to replace it with the Magic Trackpad.

Here are the different effects that it can have:

- You loose your brand traffic through SEM
- You pay to buy those lost conversions through your affiliate program at the usual CPA
- If they bid more than you and are using your display URL, your add may not appear
- You don’t have any control over the message you display on the SERP

Affiliate Tricks

- regional targeting: if they know that your office is located let’s say in Paris, they target the rest of France but not Paris so you can’t see them
- day parting: they turn their campaigns on after office hours so you are less likely to spot them
- language settings: they target other languages than the main language
- adcopy: they use the same adcopy as yours so you don’t realize it is not yours

How to spot them

- keep a close eye on your brand performance, if there are unexplicable behaviour, think about affiliates
- use the AdPreviewTool in Google, to emulate a search query with different geo & languages targeting
- use hours/hours reporting once in a while to check if nothing strange happens after office hours
- click on your brand ads once in a while to check the tracking code on the URL, this will help you spot affiliate using the same adcopy as yours
- in google adwords, check the status of your brand keywords and if the following comment appear “your ad is not displayed as there is another keyword with the same display URL” think about affiliates.

Alternatively you can invest in some competitors watching technologies that can also identify Affiliates.

Let me share with you some results of this study.

1. Year on Year spend is up 10% but Quarter on Quarter spend is stable 

2. CPCs are still low compared to last year, certainly on Google and Yahoo with a drop of more than 20% but Quarter on Quarter the CPCs are rising across all Search Engines. This can bring us to the conclusion that overall search volume and clicks have increased while the willingness of advertiser to chase clients and sales aggressively is still lower than last year given the economic climate.   

3. ROI is stable with only a little 1% drop year on year and quarter on quarter.

4. The report predicts a 10-15% growth again this year in spend.

If you would like to consult the full version of the report you can download it here:  report

The two pictures  below show just how Apple can turn totally different sites into magnificent retail stores.

Apple Store / Shangai

Apple Store – Paris / Opéra