Predicting the future for Google AdWords
Posted by Marko | Filed under Digital Marketing, PPC
As I learn more about persona development and how it ties into conversion design, my mind struggles to jot down every idea I have. I find myself in bed, trying to sleep, but all I can think about is how to make things more efficient, more relevant, better targeted and much more personalized. Geo targeting, dynamic landing pages, squeeze pages and all the other little PPC tips and tricks you can think of are NOT ENOUGH. I, as a consumer and marketer, want more.
What Google knows about you and I
Do you use Gmail? How about YouTube? Google Maps? Chrome? Chances are, you use at least one, if not many Google products. Now, do you think Google stores any personal information on your? Have you ever gone on Google and done a search and then saw sponsored ads with your city under them?
Of course you have, and no matter if you were aware of it or not, Google knows more about you then you think. The techies will say, they are just IP locating people and displaying ads relevant to where they live, they don’t actually know exactly where you are, nor is there proof that they store that data, but what about when I log into my Gmail account. All of a sudden, almost every single ad says San Diego, CA under it.
Taking AdWords to the next level
We know that the more relevant your ad, the better it converts. This has been proven over and over and over.
Imagine… You’re signed into your Gmail account, you do a search and the new ads look more like this.
It targets my name, and based on previous searches I’ve conducted it predicts where I want to go. Will it always be 100% accurate, no way, probably not even 10%, but there are ways this can be refined. Looking deeper into my Gmail account they can search against it for any mentions of a limo and a club, restaurant or any type of location stored in the Google Maps database and more accurately predict where I want to go. Is this an invasion of privacy? Probably. But what if we opt in for it? What if we can control what Google knows? Say I only want to share my name, location and sex. Do you think that would help marketers? Absolutely!!
Now, we’ve only covered the AD, what about the landing page!? Landing pages could be targeted to men and women, two separate landing pages which are triggered by a URL string. Its simple, a typical Adwords AD looks like this: http://www.google.com/url?q=san+diego+limo&url=siteyoureabouttovisit.com and now the enhanced version would look like this: http://www.google.com/url?q=san+diego+limo&gender=m&name=Marko&city=San+Diego&state=CA&url=siteyoureabouttovisit.com. If someone shares more information in their privacy settings, Google lets their advertisers target more attributes.
This would completely change landing pages! We could make them more personalized and target each one to our target audience. Assuming we have personas on our target audience, we can then create landing pages that target each one, and using their privacy shared attributes we can better funnel them to a page they would be more likely to convert on.
Using the information that the user decides to share, we can create landing pages that are very dynamic and very personalized. Even if we can only use their location and sex, we could construct two completely separate landing pages for the same product.
Will the above ever happen, I have no idea but I think its a great way for Google to one up their competition. Either way you look at it, there will be an evolution in online ad targeting because how its currently being done is simply not good enough. As customers learn more about the web, how to search for items and are overall better educated in life, they will begin to look for products and EXPECT you to impress them!
July 16th, 2009 at 10:59 pm
Good Stuff! That makes much sense…even more personalized, and i think it will happen… definitely