To my surprise, this is the alert that I received when I logged into my Adwords account this morning. It seems that Google has made a strategic decision that completely overstepped boundaries of ethics and common sense.

About Google Adwords Automatic Matching

Basically, the largest paid search advertising platform, Google Adwords, will now begin automatically adding new keywords to their advertisers campaigns. These words will spawn existing ads with the highest quality score (basically CTR) and drive users to the landing page associated with the ad. You can read the official Google Adwords Automatic Matching description if you’d like more detail; although I would imagine it will change as the industry reacts.

Google has been beta testing this Automatic Matching for a few months now and chose the day before a 3-day weekend to automatically enable this feature on Adwords advertiser accounts. At first glance some users might think this is great, since the platform will find and test new, related keywords that advertisers may have not known about. When looking at this decision by the Google Adwords team a bit closer, it is easy to see that this is not only a bad move, but more importantly, an unethical one.

Why Google Adwords Automatic Matching was poorly executed

1- No focus on REAL performance metrics
According to Google:

The system will continually monitor your performance on these queries and adjust its matches accordingly. Automatic matching aims to show your ads only on queries that yield a high clickthrough rate (CTR) and a cost-per-click (CPC) comparable to or better than your ad group’s current average CPC. This way, your ads receive additional targeted traffic at a similar cost to your current traffic.

Higher click-through rates (CTR) do not mean much for most advertisers, who are focused on the resulting user behavior beyond the click at the keyword level. Anyone that has ever measured conversions (sales, sign ups, key page visits…) knows how much variance there can be from one keyword to another, so adding new keywords with a high CTR only ensures one thing - Google is going to max out advertisers daily budgets.

Some may like getting the extra traffic, but for advertisers that are working on a tight margin, this could actually put their cost per conversion over their threshold, causing them to lose money due to an inefficient campaign configuration.

2 - Some Advertisers Keywords are Regulated
Having managed several pharmaceutical campaigns, I know that the specific keywords that are used require legal and regulatory review in order to ensure compliance with FDA regulations. Adding new keywords will automatically wind up tossing this important consumer protection layer out the window, possibly causing searchers to become misinformed about what conditions a drug effectively treats among other mishaps.

Aside from the pharmaceutical industry, I can see a lot of copyright infringement and brand misuse by affiliates and even companies themselves that have not added comprehensive negative keywords to their ad groups.

3 - Automatic Opt-In
Come on. Seriously. Automatically enabling this type of feature is straight up unethical. This should be something that advertisers can review and then decide on themselves.

4- Bad Timing and Lack of Communication
I can’t imagine that the Memorial Day holiday weekend didn’t cross the minds of Google Adwords decision makers when choosing a date to launch this feature, which is automatically enabled. How much additional ad revenue will they make by pushing the budget limits of their advertisers campaigns for a few days before everyone returns to work and has a chance to disable this feature?

Aside from that, I personally received no communication regarding Google Adwords Automatic Matching prior to logging in to my account just a few moments ago.

5 - Diluted Keyword Performance Metrics

According to Google:

Performance statistics: Aggregated performance statistics for automatic matching will appear in each ad group’s Keywords tab, in a line item labeled Automatic Matching Total.

Search Query Performance report: You can see the search queries that triggered your ads due to automatic matching by running a Search Query Performance report. The queries will be labeled Automatic in the Search Query Match Type column.

What this means is advertisers can’t even track the performance of their new, auto-added keywords on an individual basis. Google aggregates the new keywords as one channel and then allow advertisers to run a separate report to see what keyword terms actually are in that group.

For an innovative, “do no evil” company like Google, I simply can’t see how they can get out of this one without a pubic apology and some changes to the new Automatic Matching feature.

In my experience, Search Engine Marketing (SEM) has the highest ROI of all traffic channels. This is because, by design, search engine users are seeking and finding what they want, when they want it. From an advertisers perspective, being in a position to know who your prospective customers are and give them exactly what they want, when they want it is a gold mine; although this is where many inexperienced advertisers lose focus and cannibalize their own ROI.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be writing about the basics of utilizing both Paid and Organic Search in tandem to increase the overall return that advertisers get from this invaluable marketing channel. I hope that this overview will help those asking the question “what is search engine marketing?”, while providing some valuable insight for experienced marketers.

What is Search Engine Marketing?

From my perspective, SEM is basically two sub-channels focused on driving traffic from search engine results.

Organic (or “Natural”) Search Engine Optimization (SEO) focuses on gaining higher rankings for relevant terms utilizing the search engine’s proprietary algorithms. Last I read, about 70% of all clicks on a search engine results page are on the organic results. Having a clear SEO strategy and understanding of how each search engine’s algorithms weighs different factors to determine relevancy are essential when engaging in organic search engine optimization.

Paid Search focuses on paying for clicks resulting from self-written text ads which are displayed based on self-selected terms. Having control over the messaging in the text ads, the words that trigger ads and even the specific destination that visitors are sent when clicking on the ad make this channel extremely efficient for a saavy search marketer. (I’ll get into more detail on this in future posts)

Paid Search is often referred to as “SEM”, but given the figure below, I don’t buy into this misused acronym. There are also sub-channels within paid search when you go beyond the traditional search engine. Services like Yahoo’s Product Submit allow advertisers to display their product results in shopping engines on a pay-per-click (PPC) basis. For the sake of simplicity and applicability to the widest audience, I will not focus on these additional paid channels which have a very specific function.

I hope that helps answer the basic question “what is search marketing?”. I’ll try to make future posts more in-depth to add value for those already familiar with SEM.

Next Search Engine Marketing Topic:
Determining Your SEM Strategy

I read this article this morning:

Where Does Google Go Next?

It’s always cool to hear about people breaking off and doing their own thing. I think that this article is good in that respect, but it tries to put a bit of a negative spin on it, alluding that “The Google” is doing something wrong to cause more of its people to leave. If you look at the situation realistically, it is inevitable for a huge corporation, hiring tons of smart, innovative people. I think that it would be a savvy move to see them embrace their exiting entrepreneurs and help them at whatever level they need to get out and continue to build the “the internets”. Do I smell a Google Incubator Program?