Google AdWords Business Product Management Director Nicholas Fox gave a keynote speech at Search Engine Strategies. The Q&A following his speech was highly interesting, and touched on many key points concerning SEO’s now that Google is once again changing the rules of SEO.
Fox talked at length about where the search industry has been and where it is going. He mentioned that AdWords originally launched as a banner ad service, and changed to a text ad platform when it became obvious that text ads worked better. Now Google is running in excess of a billion text ad auctions a day.
Fox announced that Google has indexed about 100 billion pages and 500 billion images on the web, and that there is 20 hours of video uploaded every minute. According to Fox, search advertising is about three things:
1. Keywords
2. Text Ads
3. Cost per click
Fox did note that innovation is coming, and the face of search and SEO is changing rapidly For users this means better quality and more relevant ads. Advertisers are supposed to get better results. Google is going beyond keywords to look at more ways to make search better. The company can now look at information about your product or service and build ads automatically after crawling your website.
According to Fox:
Competition between 2 advertisers is decided as objectively as possible; a conversion rate is combined with a bid to determine which ads show first.
The CPA is more advanced on display ads rather than search, because search has more known value. Advertisers demand CPA deals on display more than on search.
Google has an image feature on Google image search now, and recognizes the importance of search and image recognition; they will continue to invest in this area as there are incredible opportunities for advertisers.
An advantage exists for ads with generic words depending on whether it is the same advertiser or two different advertisers. When similar, the ranking advantage goes to the one of highest quality .
As far as mobile search goes, Google would like to see more quickly experimented on ad creativity; it is clear that with the emergence of more sophisticated phones search and advertising can easily move to mobile devices.
The largest volumes in mobile search is happening in Japan and the US; mostly local search and product search. (There is apparently a lot of traffic to porn sites on mobiles, as well.)
Fox also hinted that keywords could possibly be replaced, or at least shoved down the ladder:
“ Here is my product catalog, descriptions of products. The keyword was great 5 years ago but the closer we can get to what the advertiser is selling the better.”