21 May 09 Google Suggest: Now with added revenue stream

If there is one thing that you’ve got to admire about Google, its their ability to find ways of making money out of literally everything.  They are literally experts in taking any possible tool or service and plastering it wiath adverts.  Blogs, Search Results, Email, Every spam site on the planet, and now they’ve found a way of monetising their Google Suggest tool.

Which means that at last, the only place in the Google empire that isn’t an advertising hoarding - the Google Home Page - is now just that.  They no longer even need to push a user through to the results of their search before offering them the unique opportunity to click on a subtle advert and make them a couple of quid.

Now, I’ve no problem with google making money, and to be honest, I could see this being a bit of a winner even though I can’t see many people using it.  Google Suggest is intended to make it easier to refine your query in line with what other people are looking for, and its a pretty cool little add on that can give you a good idea of what you might want to look for, but it is also a bit flaky.

The engine that powers Suggest appears to use advanced stemming coupled with search volume metrics to generate a list of options that you might be looking for that is refined on the fly as you type more into the box.  This is all fine and dandy, but what is painfully obvious is that the initial targeting of any advert served will be pretty poor - imagine you are looking for “Cheap trousers” - presumably you are a man of very little taste.

The first thing you type is “Cheap”, for which Google has the following suggestions:

• cheap flights
• cheap tickets
• cheap hotels
• cheap airfares
• cheap cruises
• cheap textbooks
• cheap prom dresses
• cheap car rental
• cheap books
• cheap furniture

And you can pretty much guarantee that the advert will be for “cheap flights”. When you add the t of trousers to the search box, the list changes to

• cheap tickets
• cheap textbooks
• cheap tyres
• cheap trick
• cheap tvs
• cheap tickets to India
• cheap t shirts
• cheap train tickets
• cheap tyres for sale
• cheap treadmills

When presumably the advert served will be for “tickets”

The problem is that you’ve got to get a long way into typing “cheap trousers” before you get a listing that includes “cheap trousers”, which means that you are fairly unlikely to give up and suddenly click on the advert.

Gut feeling about this is that the CTR on these adverts is going to be shockingly low, but I guess that doesn’t really matter, beccause with 80% of the search market, which equates to billions of searches each day, even a fraction of a percent of people clicking on the ads will probably result in a significant jump in revenue for the big G - after all, they will have done extensive monitoring of how people interact with the Suggest function.

The only losers here are likely to be the people who rank top of the natural search results through their SEO campaign, and even they will only be likely to drop a couple of clicks a month even for the highest volume terms that they target.

Overall impact on marketers: Negligible

Overall impact on search traffic: Negligible

Overall impact on Google Revenue: Negligible

However, I would still expect a disproportionate rise in the GOOG share price off the back of this, because with Google, even a small percentage increase in their revenue is vast in terms of the actual cash sums it represents.

Tags: Google, seo