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In 2010 we saw plenty of inno­va­tion from the search engines and social net­works, but what’s in store for 2011? I expect the inno­va­tion to con­tinue with a fur­ther push into real-time dis­play, AdWords automa­tion and, ulti­mately, less focus on key­words and more on mar­ket­ing objectives.

Keyword-less search mar­ket­ing and Google Boost

Google is hard at work gain­ing more adver­tis­ers by low­er­ing the bar­rier (i.e. cost) for AdWords self-service. Over the years we’ve seen new mod­els such as cost-per-lead for com­par­i­son — and prod­uct list­ing —  ads. These, in my view, are only the first few steps into the keyword-less search mar­ket­ing expe­ri­ence.

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Google has announced that it is chang­ing its ad poli­cies to allow adver­tis­ers to use third party trade­marks in their ad copies, even with­out approval from the trade­mark owner. The change is aimed at allow­ing reseller and com­po­nent seller etc, to clearly com­mu­ni­cate the brands they sell or support.

The pol­icy is already in place in the US, and will soon extend to the UK, Ire­land and Canada.

Fur­ther­more, as a con­se­quence of Google’s recent win over Louis Vuit­ton in the Euro­pean Court of Jus­tice and also French High Court that allowed com­pet­i­tive trade­mark key­word bid­ding, this will now be opened up across the EU. This is already the case in most other mar­kets such as the UK.

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With search engines charg­ing for clicks and not impres­sions and typ­i­cally being con­sid­ered a direct response chan­nel, you may be for­given to think that there’s lit­tle need to opti­mise for click-through rate (CTR). How­ever, since CTR is the major­ity fac­tor to deter­mine the so-called qual­ity score, which impacts the cost-per-click (CPC), this will affect the suc­cess of the cam­paign; regard­less of if objec­tives are sales, leads or traffic.

Why are search engines doing this? The adverts CTR is an impor­tant sig­nal of “qual­ity” for search engines. The logic is that if the advert matches the users query, they will click it. There­fore the higher the CTR, the more rel­e­vant the advert is assumed to be. And of course, since the search engines charge adver­tis­ers per click, their rev­enue increases.

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