Commentary

Search Focus: Searching for the Right Targets

Google brings out the big BT guns

If I had to make one prediction about Google, it would be this: Over the coming years, all of Google’s advertising will become a behavioral-based ad network. That network will track individual behaviors and deliver individually targeted ads based on information that’s shared across both its search and content sides.

Let’s consider three core areas of Google’s business to show how far they have progressed already.
Google’s oldest behavioral targeting program may be the one that lives within its organic search. Web History, which began as Search History in 2005, uses searchers’ online histories to “deliver more personalized search results based on the things you’ve searched for on Google and the sites you’ve visited.” Web History only applies to organic search results and only works for Google account holders who are logged in. The program is also opt-out.

Web History studies users’ behavior over extended periods of time, a point made particularly apparent from Google’s assurance to users: “Personalized organic search results should steadily improve over time the more you use Web History.”

This program only impacts Google organic search results: It doesn’t impact AdWords, Google’s paid search advertising network. Google is clearly headed into BT within AdWords, though.

This July, as reported in The New York Times, a Piper Jaffray analyst observed that Google search ads may be affected by what the searcher typed in a few minutes earlier. A search for “scuba,” for instance, followed a few minutes later by a search “vacations” may result in an AdWords ad for diving vacations. (This is actually an expansion of a similar initiative Google began last July.)

Google’s director of product management, Nick Fox, explains in the Times piece that doing this gives Google “a little more context” so it can provide more relevant ad results, particularly on searches that are “ambiguous.”
That’s ostensibly the same motive as the one behind Web History. But Web History digs deep into user histories, while Google’s AdWords BT only looks to the very recent past. “You may want to go back two or three queries,” Fox told the Times, but “you wouldn’t want to go back a month” or even “a day.”

So while Google’s organic search BT looks very far back into users’ histories, its paid search BT looks back only a few queries. I can’t see a good reason behind that disparity. That’s why I’d guess that, regardless of its current expressed plans, Google will ultimately make its AdWords bt work in effectively the same way as Web History does now.

To wrap up, I want to explore Google Ad Planner, which Google beta-launched in June.

Ad Planner helps media buyers find Web sites whose visitors represent their target gender, age, education, household income and online behaviors. According to Google, Ad Planner gets its information from “audience measurement data,” along “with search-engine data and information from third parties.” (Google Trends for Web sites, a similar — albeit simpler — product was launched around the same time.)

This feature doesn’t help advertisers target ads to individual users. However, it does show Google’s interest in using search behavior to guide media buys and to use that information to target particular types of individuals.

What emerges here is a picture of Google as a media company that wants to share user information across all parts of its programs — from search to content buying, and from site visits back to search. And Google wants to use that information to guide ad buys targeted to specific demographics or even specific individuals.

The logical end to all of this, in my mind, is a truly 360-degree, holistic, personally targeted ad network. How soon will that ad network emerge in full form? Stay tuned to the news to find out.

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