Google Instant – Implications for your PPC Campaigns

As I am back from a nice week in the south of France, it is time to catch up with the ppc news. The big news seems to be Google Instant.
Last week google announced that it was rolling out instant search in US, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Russia. Supported browsers include : Chrome v5/6, Firefox v3, Safari v5 for Mac and Internet Explorer v8.

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