Wednesday, May 28, 2008

Automatic Match - A Tax For Advertisers Who Can't Target



My uncle used to say that the lottery is a tax for people who can't count. Automatic Match is a tax for people who can't target.

I wrote up a short piece on Omniture's blog this morning discussing Google's beta Automatic Matching feature. If you haven't added it to your reading list, Omniture's blog covers web analytics, search, behavioral targeting and multivariate testing, all things search advertisers must become expert in to maintain a leg up on the competition.

Take a look, and expect more SearchQuant stuff on Omniture's blog going forward.

Sunday, May 18, 2008

New Google Match Type: Mis-Match

After reading this weekend that Google is widening the Automatic Matching beta, I chimed in on WMW and said my $0.02, which is that Automatic Match is about as pro-advertiser as Microsoft's forced Vista upgrade is pro-enterprise.

For those who haven't heard of Automatic Match, it's a new ad-to-query matching option (currently in beta) whereby Google looks across its advertiser accounts, finds accounts with unspent budgets and broadens the ad-to-query matching with the goal of spending the remainder of the advertisers' budgets - while being relevant.

Note, though, that this is very different from a match type that would try first to be relevant, and second to spend advertisers' budgets.

Very different. Very different. Very different. Very different.

Within a few weeks the SEM and online marketing community will be talking about this, but for now there are just a few of us crazies walking around SF, SEM Frank Chu's so to speak, trying to tell the world about the coming flood of ad dollars, the looming SEM Stupidity Tax, yes, the imminent Mis-Match.

There's not much for me to do on this one, but for some reason that last scene from Dumb & Dumber comes to mind where they pass up on the two-month oil-boy tour of duty aboard the Hawaiian Tropic Bikini Tour bus.

Don't miss the bus that is a proper match type strategy.

 
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