Keltex Blog

Google has been touting their new Instant search as giving users “better search results, faster”. But it seems that organic search results have suffered.

Here’s a search test I did using the phrase Insurance Quotes. This is a pretty highly advertised for search term. Here’s “Google Normal”

Notice that you get 4 organic results above the fold. And 8 paid results. Here’s the same search using Google Instant:

Now there’s barely 3 organic search results, 25% less than without google instant. So who suffers here? Probably Geico for one. They were the #4 search result, but now they aren’t even visible above the fold. So what does this do? Probably encourages Geico keeps their paid advertising high so that they are visible in the paid results. 

And those paid results haven’t suffered at all. Still 3 paid results below the search bar and 5 paid search results on the right side. So you’ve gone from 4 out of 12 search results being organic (33%) to 3 out of 11 searches being organic (27%).

So instead of giving you “better search results”, you’re getting less search results. So this seems to add more fuel to the fire that Google’s Instant is more about enhancing ad revenue than improving users’ search experience.

In my opinion, if Google was trying to improve user search results with Google Instant, instead of stealing screen real estate from the organic results they would steal it from the paid results. Why not show 2 paid results below the search box when google instant is active and 3 results when it’s not? Wouldn’t that be more fair?

Note: I did this test at 1024x768 resolution… a relatively common notebook resolution. Your results may vary. Some people have higher resolution screens. Others don’t use their browser maximized or have additional toolbars so they have less effective resolution.

There are two things that your online competitors are probably doing right now:

• You competitors are clicking on your AdWords ads.
• Your competitors are looking at your AdWords ads to figure out how to improve their online campaigns (and trying to take market share away from you).

If you don’t believe it’s likely, then don’t read any further. But if you think either is possible, then read on.

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I run a few different PPC campaigns for an online business. Google adwords, Yahoo Sponsored Search, and Microsft adCenter.

Trying to be a good businessman, I like to track my advertising and other expenses on a quarterly basis. So I go into adCenter and see that I can select various date ranges: Last 3 months, last 6 months, etc:

But I need last quarter which is from 10/1/09 through 12/31/09. No problem, I select Custom Date Range and then enter in these dates. Then I get this:

Er, what? You can’t entered a custom date range longer than 31 days? What the hell? How do I get this data. After fiddling around, here’s the “solution”:

1. Go to the Report Center
2. Create a Campaign Performance Report
3. Set the Unit of Time to be Month
4. Set the date range to be Custom.
5. Enter Oct 2009 through Dec 2009

And presto here’s the report.

Oh and you have to add up the monthly Spend yourself.

Memo to Microsoft… if you’re competing in the online advertising space, maybe you ought to make it easy for customers to pull out the simple data they need to run their business. I mean you’re hardly worth it as is, compared to adwords, so stop trying to make customers jump through hoops.

Maybe next post I’ll tell you about adCenter’s odd date selection methodology.