May 25, 2007 | Friday

Google’s enhanced ad text bolding: a case of trial and error?

By Stephen Powers -PR and Communications Manager  in News |Search Engines |Google |Search Expertise

Once again, Google has quietly slipped through a change in the way it sifts, sorts and displays paid search ads.

Not content with last summer’s redefinition of ‘broad match”, it has now introduced ‘enhanced ad text bolding’.

This may sound benign enough but the reality is that for Google’s advertisers, not to mention users, it’s anything but.

Google itself described the new approach to Latitude like this: “[Enhanced ad text bolding] means that an advertiser’s ad text no longer needs to exactly match a user’s query in order for it to be bolded. [It] will apply to most plural and singular terms, and some common abbreviations and misspellings. It will also apply to some words which are considered to be closely linked to the search term”.

In other words, Google is casting its net even wider to find search results. The enhanced ad text bolding will not really generate more search results; rather, it will simply make more irrelevant ones stand out more and generate more clicks.

For advertisers this can only mean they’re less likely to be found by Google users, not more. Similarly for users, the results they’re offered are less likely to be relevant to their chosen search term, not more.

So who stands to benefit from ‘enhanced ad text bolding’? For starters there’s Google itself. By displaying more but potentially less relevant ads, the company seems to be trying to maintain or improve revenue growth on the back of increased click through rates.

Then, there are the lucky companies whose ads are now deemed (by Google) to contain just enough of a user’s search term to be considered ‘closely linked’.

Worringly, Google itself seems unsure exactly how the new system works.  Last week it told Latitude: “Unfortunately there is no way to predict which words will be in a bold font. The best thing to do is take a trial and error approach if you would like this affect (sic) to appear in some of your ads”.

Trial and error? I can’t think of a better description for what Google has done.

As George Michie wrote in his 3 November 06 blog on broad matching “Google needs to maintain its focus on ad relevance. Poorly targeted results train users to avoid sponsored links, and that hurts Google and advertisers alike.”

Spot on, George!

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