Eric Schmidt explains how search and targeting are related
In the great interview with Eric Schmidt by Charlie Rose he was asked what kind of innovations we will see from Google in the future.
As one example Schmidt explained a very interesting service Google is working on – which can be used to explain the relationship between targeting and search.
The huge business Google built on his search business is in fact nothing else than a primitive but yet powerful and clear targeting approach. Show people ads according to their interests – which are derived from their searches.
The huge monetization Google sees from this is not only based on the fact that a lot of people are using the search engine and therefore Google has a lot of contacts and reach. It even more has to do with the fact that Google ads are much more relevant than other ads people see online.
So Targeting works – on a search page.
But only a minor part of peoples online behavior is on search machines – the majority of attention and online usage time is still (and will be) on content pages – because that’s what people are searching for.
So one of the most exciting questions is whether it will be possible to apply the same principles as Google did so successful on the search pages on the vast amount of content pages?
The answer is yes. And no.
No because one important link is missing: it’s not so easy to obtain peoples interest based on their online usage on content pages. It has to be derived from the usage, the content they read, the time they spent on which type of content and so on. This is less powerful than search because of two reasons. First content usage tells a drastically less direct story about the users interest. The content he or she is looking at could eventually be of very limited interest. Or – even worse from an algorithmic point of view – it’s relevance for this user could be difficult to obtain, for instance he could disagree with the content but still enjoy reading it. Or the reading could be related to a very short-term interest and tell almost nothing about this person in general. Or he could read about someone who died in a car that accidentially hit a horse without at all being interested in cars nor horses nor funerals at all…
So deriving interests and attitudes from peoples content usage is difficult. But of course it tells you a lot about someone if you’d be able to collect and analyze tons of webpages he visited over time.
And that’s the yes. Yes, it is possible to derive meaningful information about people online if you track what they are doing, especially what kind of content they are using more frequently than others.
But I wanted to use the Eric Schmidt answer above to explain why search and targeting are perhaps more related than people think.
Schmidt explains how a google search could deliver meaningful information in the future. He described how Google would us all available information about a person walking through New York on a holiday trip. It would use the location, time of day, speed of walking and other information that tells what this guy is actually doing and looking for. And then this future Google search would do implicit searches on his own and show up with useful information related to the building someone is just looking at for example. Because Google knows that this guy is interested in architecture.
"Imagine the situation where the person, the GPS, the phone, and this constant searching creates a narrative stream. It’s highly personal and highly entertaining. Entertain me."
So what does this tell us in terms of targeting? Well – what Schmidt described as the future of Google is actually what todays targeting systems are already doing when people browse the web.
With every single click on a content page the targeting system will do a “search” over the informations available for this user, combine it with the actual information of the current click and come back with a recommendation what would be useful for this guy.
Todays targeting systems already apply the implicit search Google is working on!
Of course this still is in an early stage and the relevancy of a search ad is still much higher and clearer to the user than any targeted display ad. But this is going to change – and then advertisers will see the same relevance and performance for their display ads as they are used to with their performance ads on Google Search today!
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