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Google Instant Steals 25% of Your Organic Search Results

blog.keltex.com

11–20 of 55 posts

Re: Google Instant Steals 25% of Your Organic Search Results

#11

Do we know if the suggested results are based on search frequency or revenue maximization? -- i.e. if I type in "plan my" will it suggest "travel" above "vacation" if the PPC/CTR on the ads for "plan my travel" generate more $s than "plan my vacation"? That seems like a much more clever optimization than stealing screen real estate. The other optimization to this is if they can guide users to a smaller list of common…

Interesting, so... ORDER BY (CPC * CTR); versus ORDER BY (CTR); yeah, i know they're not using SQL

CPC * CTR = RPM, and that's what AdSense optimizes for. In effect it's brilliant in it's simplicity as it combines both advertisers wishes (CPC) and consumer's wishes (CTR).

Re: Google Instant Steals 25% of Your Organic Search Results

#13
>So instead of giving you “better search results”, you’re getting less search results.

Are certainly not mutually exclusive. And when searching for a specific thing/site (rather than going for broad exposure on a given topic) less results, preferably 1 (the correct one) is best.

Re: Google Instant Steals 25% of Your Organic Search Results

#14
Instant's goal is to change user search behavior away from potentially long tail queries towards the head.

If they can short circuit your potentially 4-6 word specific search that has fewer and lower paying advertisers associated for a shorter, higher interest/CPC search, they stand to make a lot more money and please larger brand advertisers.

That they can wrap it up to users as "decreasing search time" and "better search results" is brilliant.

Re: Google Instant Steals 25% of Your Organic Search Results

#15

There's been quite a lot of UX research on this, and the concept of "the fold" simply doesn't exist for webpages. People scroll and scan, even the least knowledgeable ones.

You're exaggerating. Web users spend 80% of their time looking at information above the page fold. The part of what you're saying that's true is that people scroll at all. This is new. See http://www.useit.com/alertbox/scrolling-attention.html

Re: Google Instant Steals 25% of Your Organic Search Results

#17
post #4

Google has two goals with Instant... first, they want to improve the user experience by offering inline suggestions - makes sense - I like that part. What they're not advertising is that Google is dealing with the same decreased CTR and advertising revenue that the rest of the Internet is. In an effort to seem as user-centric as possible, they've introduced a user friendly feature with a refinement that increases the…

I've always found it funny that advertisers swear by CTR as much as they do. It's almost as if they completely forgot the last few decades of television advertisement. For television, no one gives a damn if a viewer goes out to buy the product right that instant. It's all about repetition and building psychological reinforcements so that once the viewer actually needs something along the lines of what that product of…

I think you're speaking in terms of a specific market. A local florist ppc'ing does not have the luxury of affording to brand in this economy.

inherently a click affords more branding anyway as you are much better able to control the presentation of your brand on a page you have complete control over.

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