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by OGinparadise
4839 days ago
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Ironically, Google has been pushing brands way up in search for 4-5 years now, and it may come back to bite them. Many said it was due to brands being more profitable for Google, but long term it builds brands to the point of users bypassing Google. Ah the challenges of being both an 'impartial' judge of content and the world's largest ad engine. Another thing is the price, it has skyrocketed lately. What may have made sense at $0.40 a click, no longer does at $2 a click. |
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1. "Google has been pushing brands way up in search for 4-5 years now" - True, but it's important to note this is not a result of Google deciding "let's promote brands", it's a result of Google's algorithm improving. Google looks at query chains, sees that people hit certain sites after a few unsuccessful broad searches, and thus improves the broad search rankings of those sites. It is no coincidence that a significant portion of these "certain sites" happen to be big brands, which leads to point 2.
2. Brand advertising creates affinity - As Eric Schmidt put it: "Brand affinity is clearly hard wired." People end up at brand sites at the end of query chains because they recognize them, they trust them more, or they are just more familiar with them.
3. Google has lots of Brand advertising space - A quick review of the numbers of any Big Brand's SEM program will show some really abysmal inefficiencies and totally unnecessary bias towards branded searches (that's another problem altogether.) But the point is, Big Brands don't care if they could turn off Paid Search Ads in some areas and get the same ROI through other channels, they want to buy ads to signal they are a big brand, to saturate your vision with their brand and create the above mentioned affinity and familiarity.
Thus the cycle continues and Google has nothing to worry about with regards to big brands lowering Paid Search spend.