It has become widely assumed that the introduction of Google Instant is going to boost search prices for advertisers. The reasoning is this: Because the user could choose a search result before finishing writing out his or her query, advertisers may be forced to bid more for more common terms. Maybe so, but maybe not, says Greg Sterling, principal of Sterling Market Intelligence. "I don't think we should prematurely jump to conclusions. Let’s see how this has played out in a few weeks or months from now,” he tells MarketingVOX. Instead of pricing rising, they could fall as marketers double down on their organic search processes in response, he suggested.
Meanwhile, other industry participants MarketingVOX spoke to raised additional points that marketers may not have considered as they eyed the supposed rising prices of popular search terms.
More people will focus on fewer searches. "For instance, if I was looking for a pet food delivery service, I would start typing in "pet food" and Google would show me results for a company called Pet Food Express,” says Evan Bailyn, founder of Good Media Co. "I might just click on that company instead of finishing my search for "pet food delivery" which would show me Petco.com as the top result instead. So achieving a #1 result for a more commonly typed-in search (in this case, it seems more people type "pet food express" than "pet food delivery") will increase in importance for every search engine optimizer."
Long-tail search gets de-emphasized. This has been the cause of much handwringing, but Bailyn doesn’t think it is bad for the industry. "Most of the time, my client don't ask me to optimize them for long-tail searches anyway, but rather for relatively common searches, such as "criminal lawyer san francisco" and "diamond engagement rings." If I were optimizing a client for a long-tail search like "criminal lawyer san francisco bay area," I would be pretty unhappy with Google Instant, but then again, why would I be doing that, since that term is almost never searched for."
Google Instant is going to crowd out the short-term and amateurish marketers. Marketers that are bidding and optimizing based on analytics are bound to do better vs. the marketers that are still playing 'SEM roulette', says Akin Arikan, director of product strategy and web analytics evangelist at Unica. "Namely, it becomes more important to know how much you can afford to pay per click. And that depends not just on your short-term conversion rate and sale, but also on the lifetime value that you expect for acquired customers."
The marketer who analyzes across the lifetime of purchases can afford to spend more and can outbid others that are just looking at the initial sale, he explains. Then, if you can influence lifetime value through things such as re-targeting, cross-sales, but also good customer on-boarding, retention detection and win-back marketing, you are able to increase how much money you can afford to pay Google.
