On June 27, Margrethe Vestager of the European Commission announced that Google has been fined €2.4 billion because it abused its market power by promoting its own shopping comparison service at the top of the search results over those of other price-comparison websites. The fine is the largest penalty to date against a company accused of distorting the market and is significantly higher than was expected.

Google’s response

Google had previously denied that its practices harm competition and in 2015 argued its results align with consumers evolving demands:
“Google has always to worked to improve its services, creating new ways to provide better answers and show more useful ads.”

Following the announcement of the fine, in a subdued blog post, Google argued:
“Our data shows that people usually prefer links that take them directly to the products they want, not to websites where they have to repeat their searches… Showing ads that include pictures, ratings and prices benefit us, our advertisers and most of all, our users.”

The broader challenge

The challenge with this antitrust ruling for Google is larger than the fine itself and broader than just Google Shopping. At the heart of this ruling is a challenge to Google’s quest to use its scale and data across a wide range of products to provide better user experiences.

As Google seeks to provide users with answers to their questions through search, its services need to be brought closer together, not further apart, to provide a better service to consumers. What will be concerning Google most about this ruling, is that if it is restricted with Google Shopping, similar antitrust restrictions may follow across its other services like Android and Maps.  Two other antitrust cases with the EU are already under way. 

What happens next?

Google has 60 days to formally respond and the ruling orders Google to end its anticompetitive practices within 90 days or face further penalties. 

Here are five possible ways Google may respond:

1. Google closes Shopping search in Europe

At the most extreme, Google could simply pull out of Shopping search in Europe. When Google was legally challenged in Spain with Google News, it simply chose to end the Google News product in that market. We think this scenario is highly unlikely given the importance of the Shopping product to Google.

2. Include other comparison engines in Shopping ads

This would be hard to envisage in the way  Shopping results are currently shown, as only direct retailers can buy Product Listing Ads rather than comparison engines. If Google made this change, the user experience would be reduced, so we think this is also unlikely. 

3. Increase visibility of comparison engines on shopping terms

By providing Shopping comparison engines like Kelkoo access to additional text ads near to Google Shopping ad units, Google could seek to appease the ruling however it would unlikely be enough to satisfy the EU.

4. Appoint a third-party auditor

Some have called for a neutral party to be involved in auditing Google’s compliance, but it is very unlikely that Google would ever agree to have its algorithms and UI regulated. 

5. Challenge the ruling in the courts

This seems the most likely scenario as this ruling cuts at the heart of what Google is seeking to achieve, with a more seamless integrated experience across its products to provide direct answers to consumers questions. 

Implications for advertisers

Right now, there are no immediate implications for advertisers though that could change depending on how Google responds to the ruling.  

Most interesting in this story is the two opposing views and the direction the EU is taking on anticompetitive practices with Google. At the core of Google’s roadmap and development is integrating its products and services to provide seamless cross device (desktop, mobile, voice) experiences to consumers which benefits their users, advertisers and of course themselves. But the EU is set to restrict this integration and not afraid to yield its power. This battle is likely to continue for many years.

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The talk at CES this year was that 2017 will be the year of voice, and one of the clear winners was Amazon’s Alexa, which was embedded in a variety of devices from cars to home intercoms. Amazon has a slight head start on the competition with Alexa, but Google is rapidly catching up and has a much stronger base to build off – most people in the world go to Google for answers.

But what does this shift to voice as a user interface mean for brands? Are there any immediate advertising opportunities?  Below are some of the challenges and opportunities for brands to win in voice search advertising. 

Voice is set to become a primary interface

The industry seems to agree that voice is set to become a primary means of interfacing with technology. All the big tech players are investing heavily in voice and personal assistants: Amazon with Alexa, Google with Google Assistant, Apple with Siri and Microsoft with Cortana. Amazon, Apple, Google and Microsoft are all betting on this technology, and it’s fast becoming a reality. 

The importance of voice became evident when Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced last year that 20% of Google’s mobile queries are now voice queries, meaning over 10% of Google’s searches globally are through voice. 

Voice is currently ad free but this will change

Currently, if you interact with Google using voice only, it’s a completely ad free environment as there are no voice ads. This has led to some investors questioning the sustainability of Google’s ad model, but its early days and we should expect Google to open up advertising opportunities in the next couple of years. 

It is clear that Google will need to start monetising voice interactions soon, and when it does there are a few different routes it could take. Here are five ways Google may make money through voice from brands:

1. Sponsored visibility

When someone searches for a business or service using voice search, it easy to envisage a scenario where visibility could be sponsored. For example, if someone voice searched “Find an Italian restaurant close to my location, open now”, Google could factor a sponsored result into the answer. To ensure the sponsored result is relevant, they would likely adopt an AdRank type algorithm (perhaps called VoiceRank).  If it does become possible to influence ranking of brand or location visibility through AdWords, it will become popular with advertisers – being first in voice results is even more important than traditional text results.

2. Sponsored factual answers

Voice search is particularly useful when a user needs to ask a question with a clear factual answer. Currently if a user does a voice search for “can my dog eat chocolate”, the answer will be sourced from the Google one box which scrapes the answer from Hills Pet Food. In the future, Google may enable another brand to bid on that voice answer if their response is equally valid.  For the question “what is a mortgage”, clearly a number of advertisers might wish to be the brand that Google refers the answer from. 

While it’s unlikely, Google could even open up more standard answers to be sponsored by a brand like XE.com. If a user were to ask: “what is £12 in US dollars”, Google could reply: “According to XE.com, 12 pounds is 15.09 US dollars”. This scenario enables a brand to fuel an answer that previously would have been delivered by Google. 

3. Sponsored brand actions

In November, Google opened up brand actions enabling users to interact using voice and the Google Assistant through devices like Google Home and Google Pixel. 

Currently actions for Google can be set up by brands free of charge with just an initial development cost. But when actions for brands is more widely adopted, Google may well start to charge brands to have actions enabled on Google Assistant. It could essentially become a pure pay to play platform in the way Google Shopping has. 

4. Taking a commission on voice purchases

There are indications that payment through voice search will become a possibility in the future and when it does will Google charge a commission?  For example, someone asks Google: “book me a ticket to watch Shrek 5 at my closest cinema tonight”, Google may make the booking through a booking engine where it takes a commission. This scenario can be played out across many verticals and indeed wherever payment takes place across voice, particularly if Google confines voice purchases to its own parent gateway Google wallet. 

5. Audio ads through Google Play and Podcasts

Google Assistant users can listen to Google Music if they have premium subscription and listen to news updates and podcasts using voice commands alone.  As the user base of Google Assistant grows big enough, Google could start running audio ads. Brands could target these ads either contextually around the content being consumed (e.g. an investment ad at the end of an investment podcast) or targeted to the users based on previous searches or brand website visits.  

It’s really only a matter of time until the likes of Google start monetising voice as an advertising platform. When these opportunities open up, Google will be careful to ensure that they do not detract from the overall consumer experience, so brands that play first will be well rewarded.

The post How Brands Will Win in Voice Search Advertising? appeared first on PerformanceIN.

In August 2014, Google announced that it would start using HTTPS as a ranking factor within the organic Search results so websites using secure servers would benefit from a small ranking boost. This move from Google signalled its desire to reward websites which provided a more secure experience for users. It was unlikely that Google would stop at just rewarding websites that are using HTTPS and in December 2014 developers at Google Chrome discussed design ideas to warn users every time they visit an unsecure HTTP website.

What’s clear is that Google is set on improving web standards and one part of that is moving the whole web towards HTTPS. In 2014 we saw Google rewarding websites using HTTPS but in 2015 we will see Google going one step further by taking punitive action against websites using HTTP.

Why does Google want websites to use HTTPS?

In Google’s August announcement, Google stated that security is a top priority which is why it adopted HTTPS across its services so that people using Search, Gmail and Google Drive, automatically have a secure connection. It went on to say that beyond its own services, it is “working to make the Internet safer more broadly. A big part of that is making sure that websites people access from Google are secure”. So Google has been making its own services more secure and are keen to ensure that the sites it is sending traffic to are also secure.

The reason for this is that hackers and government agencies have in the past abused insecure connections to steal data and spy on people. When websites move to HTTPS, data is encrypted between the user and the website so the user has security and privacy. It’s no secret that Google was outraged by the alleged NSA hacking of its data and Google quickly responded to that by moving its services to HTTPS.

How are people responding to HTTPS?

The vast majority of online security experts agree that it would be a good thing for HTTPS to become the standard as it will improve security, for users and the internet as a whole. It’s important to be aware however that HTTPS does not guarantee that a website is secure, as the heartbleed vulnerability in Open SSL demonstrated.

Although there has been a generally positive response to Google pushing HTTPS, Yahoo and Bing have not followed Google’s lead in awarding a ranking boost for websites that use HTTPS. Additionally there is no suggestion that FireFox and Internet Explorer considering marking HTTP websites as non-secure within their browsers, so for the time being it’s very much Google who is the driving force behind the move to HTTPS.

How much of the web is using HTTPS?

According to Google, only 10% of web pages globally are HTTPS, however this number is growing and of the top 300k websites globally, the adoption of HTTPS over the last two years has grown over 300% from 4% to 13% and many expect it to grow by a much higher rate in 2015.

While the rate of adoption of HTTPS is still relatively low, businesses should now be considering using HTTPS for all the content on their websites as it is fast becoming a global standard.

What to consider before moving to HTTPS?

Google has compiled very thorough guidelines and best practices for moving to HTTPS which can be accessed here. Some businesses made the move to HTTPS too quickly after Google’s announcement in August and experienced CMS issues when moving to HTTPS (there are known issues for Magento and WordPress sites) so it’s important that the switch is only done after rigorous testing and once redirects are in place. For businesses already using HTTPS, they need to check whether this is being used across the whole domain or just on specific pages where sensitive data is transmitted. Google has stated that it wants websites to use HTTPS across all the content on the domain, not just on checkout or login pages.

So the web is moving towards HTTPS with Google being the driving force behind this. It’s really not a question of if you need to move to HTTPS but when you will move to HTTPS. Google will make it happen by rewarding sites using HTTPS and eventually penalising sites not using it – they adopted a similar approach with mobile accessibility and it worked in improving mobile standards across the web.

The post Why Does Google Want Your Website to Use HTTPS? appeared first on PerformanceIN.

Most search marketers were disappointed when Google announced that they would be forcing close variant keyword matching on all AdWords accounts without the option of disabling it. Few were surprised when Bing followed suit in announcing that they would also be automatically enabling close variant keyword matching, although Bing kept the option of opting out of close variants if advertisers wanted to.

The move towards close variant keyword matching has formally signalled the end of true exact match keyword bidding, where an advertiser could choose to bid on only one keyword string. As it has now been one month since close variants keyword matching has been mandatory on Google, it’s important to understand why Google made the change and what the impact of this change has been.

Mobile search queries partly responsible for roll out of close variant matching

Some cited the reason for Google to enforce close variant keyword matching is to grow the number of keywords that advertisers are bidding on and so inflate cost per clicks (CPCs), thereby increasing their ad revenue. While this is an inevitable outcome of close variant matching, Google stated that they made the change to make it easier for advertisers to connect with consumers who are searching for keywords closely related to the keywords the advertiser wants to appear against. With the rise of mobile search, we are seeing more diversity in the keyword strings that people are typing in, owing to an increase in misspelling and the use of abbreviations from users on mobile devices. Mobile Search has been changing the Search query landscape for some time and mobile search is a big part of the reason why Google and Bing have moved to close variant matching.

What is close variant keyword matching?

With close variant keyword matching enabled, search ads are triggered against the use of misspelling, singular and plural forms, stemming, accents and abbreviations. The chart below demonstrates how close variants work with traditional match types:

How close variants keyword matching change will impact your campaigns

With ‘traditional’ phrase match and ‘traditional’ exact match now completely phased out on Google, advertisers are forced to buy keyword variations which are closely related. There is no way out of this within AdWords unless extensive negative keyword lists are created and that is a time consuming exercise even when scripts are used.

Advertisers will see higher search volumes and more competition for keyword searches

According to research from Google, advertisers using close keyword variations will receive – on average – 7% more clicks than when close variant keyword matching was disabled. By making close variant matching standard, Google and Bing have grown the number of search queries that advertisers are bidding against. So advertisers can expect to see higher search volumes and more competition as competitors are also forced to bid on closely related keywords.

As a result of close variants keyword matching, there will inevitably be more advertisers eligible to appear against more queries, the result being that advertisers will likely see an increase in CPCs.

Negative keywords are more important now than ever

Now that close variants keyword matching is enforced on Google and enabled by default on Bing, the use of negative keywords has become more important as negative keywords are the only way to ensure that an ad does not show for certain search queries considered by Google and Bing as close variants. It’s more important than ever that Search teams regularly check Search Query Reports to monitor the actual search queries which users have typed in before they were shown an ad, so they can add any irrelevant searches as negative keywords.

Goodbye exact match, welcome close variant matching

Love it or hate it, close variant keyword matching is here to stay and Search Marketers need to ensure that their campaigns are set up in a way to maintain as much control over what keywords they are bidding on as possible. 

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