An excerpt:
You know how you get suggestions on ... the query you're typing into a Googlish search box? That suggestion list just became context-sensitive, more personalized, and more likely to send you to your destination without ever seeing a page of search results.All it takes is one ad, the right ad in the right place.
Oh, and you'll see advertising in that box, too. If you never see a results page, you might still send revenue Big G's way.
Yahoo recently promised to kill the typical "10 blue links" results in favor of more dynamic presentations. Google immediately took that idea one step further and did away with results altogether for many searches.
While Yahoo, Microsoft's MSN/Live/Kumo/whatever, Time Warner's AOL, and IAC/InterActiveCorp's Ask.com depend on exposing users to as many ads as possible by keeping them on their sites, Google is going the other way. All it takes is one ad -- the right ad in the right place -- and Google's cash flow is secure.
Long ago, when I was at Amazon working on personalization, we used to joke that the ideal Amazon site would not show a search box, navigation links, or lists of things you could buy. Instead, it would just display a giant picture of one book, the next book you want to buy.
When you overwhelm people with choices, the important becomes lost in the mediocrity. Showing as many ads as possible just encourages ad fatigue. The focus of web advertising should be on getting the right ad in the right place. The focus should be on relevance.
5 comments:
I have been following Google AdWords ad coverage data for several years now, and the problem with your argument is that Google has actually been inreasing ad covering for the past 2-3 quarters (as several measurement firms and SEM firms have affirmed).
This is not about relevancy, it's about money in a situation where Google's organic growth has slown.
Thanks, Chris, can you give me a link to data on Google's ad coverage? Or an excerpt of the data with a citation for following up to get more? I would enjoy seeing that.
"when I was at Amazon working on personalization, we used to joke that the ideal Amazon site would ... the next book you want to buy."
That might be good if Amazon were only about personalized recommendations, which it clearly isn't. Like all retail merchants, it's critical to get customers to notice and buy stuff from various product lines. No one would ever buy a high-margin lawnmower or piece of jewelry or box of toothbrush heads from Amazon if it was just about personalization.
Hi, Anonymous. It's a good point, but there seems to be an implicit assumption here that personalization can only show you things very similar to what you bought before.
The goal of personalization should be the opposite, to introduce you to new things, to enhance discovery.
To take your specific example, Amazon can use a combination of cross product correlations (e.g. people who buy cookbooks tend to be interested in kitchen items) and explore/exploit (e.g. try showing what are essentially ads for jewelry and items from other product lines and learn what interests you) to encourage customers to explore different product lines.
If I can interest you in more on that, I have a couple older posts, "Yahpo home page cries out for personalization" and the much older "Yahoo finally testing a new home page", that looks at using personalization for a similar problem Yahoo has with introducing people to all the various products and services on their massive site.
Thanks, Chris, can you give me a link to data on Google's ad coverage? Or an excerpt of the data with a citation for following up to get more? I would enjoy seeing that.Greg, I don't have such data, but I will point out that, since 2004, Google started showing from 1-3 ads above the organic results, where before there used to be zero ads above the results.
So if it's going down again, it went up before it went down.
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