Google’s Over Personalization

by Kate Morris

Kate Morris is an independent Search Engine Marketing consultant. You can always find her on Twitter @katemorris.

Google has been at the top of the PPC and personalization game for the past few years. Their goal has always been to produce the best results for the end user, no matter the results
to the advertiser.

In late September 2008, some friends on Twitter, SEOMike and Sallymander, asked about some weird results they were seeing on Google search results. As SEOMike pointed out, a search for one product (office furniture) followed immediately by another product (car rental) returned some odd paid advertisements.

The first search looks very normal. The subsequent search for car rental displays an ad in position 10 for “Office Outlet of Austin.” Please note that I am logged in, so Google knows that I am in Austin.

Now this is nothing “new,” there are industry mentions about it all the way back to mid-2007. WebmasterWorld first noted it on April 24, 2007. Sphinn had a story post on Google Personalization in July 2007, but even that didn’t get a whole lot of attention from the SEO community. It was noted by a few industry people, namely Danny Sullivan and Barry Schwartz, but hadn’t really gotten anyone’s attention.

Why not? Well I think SEOs on the whole (warning: gross generalization) are afraid of Paid Search. The real sexy part of this industry is the natural stuff, the code. So I personally think very few people paid attention to this development. Also, most of the examples out there made sense when the feature was announced. The idea of showing ads for a previous search in the results of the next one works when the searcher is just modifying the original search. The issue comes when people turn ADD and search for completely unrelated terms in succession.

I was a little perturbed by the situation and came up with a list of questions for my AdWords representative. She got back to me with some answers that were on Google’s site, but nothing specific. {Update: she called while I was editing this post with an answer to question 3 below}

So I am going to attempt to answer my own questions using what they give on the site and my own knowledge of PPC campaigns. I welcome anyone from AdWords to please comment on here or contact me with the real answers, inquiring minds want to know!

1. There are some ads and campaigns specific to user queries. For example, my company only has one product but different ways to describe it. We have developed different ads based upon search needs. So someone searching for “lower my interest rate” is different than “auto refinancing.” If the ads are served in different places, then the quality may go down.

Google: Whenever an ad is served based on the associated keyword’s relevance to the previous search query, the ad’s performance has no effect on that keyword’s Quality Score. 

My Answer: Basically what I read this as is Google isn’t going to count it against us if the ad is not clicked on in this environment. We all know that CTR is still a determinant in Quality Score, so this is a relief.

1. How does Google pick which ad from the previous set is chosen to show on the next query?

My Answer: This question had two meanings. Which competitor’s ad and then which ad of that competitor?

I think Google chooses the ad deemed most relevant or popular based on the perceived intention of the searcher, aka it’s random but it’s not. They take as many variables into affect when choosing the ad to display here as a normal search. For me, it was a local ad because “car rental”
was a very locally intentioned search but the ad served was not a first page ad on the previous search.

1. What happens to dynamic ad titles?

Google: The ad title is dependent on the keyword that brought up the ad, not the query. So when a personalized search result like this happens Google will use the keyword trigger (on the previous search) or the default title you set in the ad. My Answer: Lots of advertisers have dynamically inserted titles based on the keywords used. The ads might not make sense with the second query’s text. I cannot find an example of this, but my guess would be a hope that Google would default to the predetermined title, rather than using the second term query for the title.

What questions do you have about this? The idea with this “feature” of the Google paid advertisement system is good, but the execution is rusty. I would love to see more transparency on how Google controls relevancy and ad text based on the search stream.

Until that day, my recommendation is to just ignore it. We as advertisers cannot change what is being shown in this fashion. So until Google gives us more information I think we are best off making our campaigns and ad groups as streamlined as possible so that Google knows what we are selling and who we are targeting. Optimization is always going to be the key in search marketing!