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| Knowledge Graph Recommending Competitors? Posted: 21 Feb 2014 06:30 AM PST Is anyone else concerned about the ads and competitor recommendations in Google’s Knowledge Graph? Ginny Marvin’s fine post on SEL highlighted the fact that for a selection of movie titles the ads shown in Knowledge Graph about those movies seemed to disproportionately favor Amazon downloads and Google Play over other streaming sites. That is interesting, but ultimately the brand — in this case the movie/film studio — doesn’t really care which distribution partners are featured, so, while Netflix might need to spend more to get in the mix, Despicable Me 2 is likely indifferent.
What I find disturbing is that if I search for “Target” the Knowledge Graph tells me all kinds of good stuff about Target, but then also points out that people also search for WalMart, Best Buy, Sam’s Club, etc. Now maybe this isn’t a big deal for Target since everyone knows their competitors. But suppose you’re a fashion brand like Express? Do you really need Google to tell your customers who else they should consider before buying at Express? An argument could be made that there have always been ads for competitors on brand searches so this is no big deal. I don’t agree. “The Knowledge Graph” carries with it a certain authoritative aura. Where search ads from other brands seem a wee bit desperate (look at me! look at me!) Having an “Everything you should know about this brand,” source with stock tickers, etc saying: “and you should also consider these other companies…” that’s just wrong! Companies work hard to develop their brand and generate the kind of loyalty and interest that prompts people to search for them by name. “Helpfully” encouraging those loyal customers to shop around erodes the lifetime value of customers, and ironically could bite Google in the butt down the road. Companies invest in non-brand paid search to reach new customers. Many companies are willing to lose money on an initial purchase from a new customer because lifetime value makes that a growth investment that pays off. If, however, lifetime value erodes (because some unnamed navigational tool suggests alternatives instead of simply helping the person find the info they requested) companies will in turn be less willing to invest in new customers. Do others find this practice objectionable? Is it different than just normal ads from competitors?       |
| Video: Enhanced Campaigns Targeting and Bidding Challenges Posted: 20 Feb 2014 02:13 PM PST In our last video on Enhanced Campaigns we briefly covered why they were inevitable and ultimately a good thing. They do present some challenges though and here we want to discuss those challenges, particularly targeting and bidding. Watch the last video titled, “Enhanced Campaigns: Challenges and Opportunities.”
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT George Michie: Hi. I’m George Michie. I want to talk today about Enhanced Campaigns and some of the challenges we face with this. In my last video I talked a little bit about why Enhanced Campaigns were sort of inevitable and why we’re excited about them. There are some challenges though, and I want to be upfront with them. We have, from Google, the ability to target through Enhanced Campaigns for features like proximity to a store which are really exciting, but currently Google isn’t passing us the data to tell us how close a given user was to one of our physical locations. What that means is we can’t actually see whether there is a performance difference for folks who are closer to a brick and mortar versus farther away. So we have the ability to set different bids based on proximity, we just don’t currently have the ability to actually see whether it matters or not, or whether it matters as a function of device or time of day, or whatever. So we think that is a challenge. We have had conversations with Google about it to say, ‘We need this.’ They get that. They’re concerned about privacy issues and whether they can share a time stamp of when this person was at exactly what location. Understandable, but we’d like to get that information if we can. The second big challenge that I think is out there is what we refer to as the problem of stacking. Right now the modifiers you place on your bids have to stack on top of each other. So if you say, for example, we know that the conversion rate on smart phones is one fifth of that on laptops or tablets, we’re going to have, generally speaking, a modifier that says if this is a smart phone, only bid 20% of what you would normally bid. But let’s say within a mile of my store, so this proximity notion, we want to bid a reasonable amount for the smart devices because the person might be on foot and might walk into one of our stores. So let’s say your base bid for a given ad is $1 and your mobile bid then is 20 cents, and you say, ‘Well, if it’s within a mile of my store I want to bid $1. Okay. So you have to then have a proximity bid that says multiply whatever bid that you have by 5. So let’s look at what that does to our laptop bid. All of a sudden we’ve gone, in that proximity, from a $1 bid to a $5 bid. That may make sense. That may be crazy. We don’t know because we haven’t seen the data. But the problem is, if it turns out to be crazy, we still have to stack those bid modifiers on top of each other. There’s no way to create conditional logic that says, ‘I only want to bid a fifth for mobile devices if it’s more than this far away.’ And so Google is aware of that challenge also. We think there are a number of ways to address it, but the fix may be a long time down the road. So more on what excites us about Enhanced Campaigns coming up in another video. Thanks.  Related:
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