Google paid search becomes personalised

Following on from a whole stretch of noticeable changes that Google has been making to their service is one that perhaps won’t be making as many waves, but is of huge importance. Engadget has a little post about it, along with a video of the explanation from Google:

The long and the short of it is that there is now an option at the top of Google to find out where your adverts came from. This is odd, because in a previous post we looked at what the ranking factors in Google paid search are. What would be of relevance to a user in this list of things? Do they need to know about the quality score of the landing page?

Well it turns out that there is a new ranking factor and it is the users searching history. So if I search Google for ‘Green trousers’ and ‘long trousers’ I’ll get pages that look like this:

Searching for Green Trousers on Google

Having subsequently decided that I am going to buy a pair of long trousers, I might search for ‘trousers for sale’ and I’ll get presented with this:

Searching for Trousers for sales in Google

Google has remembered what my search was the first time round and offered me results based on that as well. Creepy eh? Of course this is part of the big personalisation plan that involves everyone being logged into the Google Plus account and getting completely personalised results.

But what does it mean for the advertisers out there? Well your analytics is going to start to look a bit odd and there will be a couple of reasons why:

• If your user isn’t logged in, you’ll start seeing some odd results against your campaigns – remember to segment your campaign against the keyword the user used. It may start giving you some useful results for things that you can bid on in the future. In my example you may not be bidding on ‘trousers for sale’, but if there is a good conversion rate it will encourage you. Equally you might see an awful conversion rate and put it on your negative keyword list
• If your user is logged in, you won’t see any search term results (as per the (not provided) that you get for natural results), so you’ll be left guessing as to what the user actually typed in. This, as mentioned last week, may lead to a bit of bias in your search data as you won’t be able to tell if the user is responding to the keywords that you really wanted in your campaign.