Real-Time Search: New Opportunities

Yesterday’s announcement by Google about their real-time search capabilities has implications not only for consumers but for marketers. Our research into Google’s Real Time Search in SERPs has revealed a number of important trends with potential impact for marketers, including:

1. Organic search results for keywords that have real-time search results would be bumped down further by these real-time results.

2. PPC links will now compete with specially-formatted real-time results for users' attention, possibly reducing their 'stand out' factor. This would reduce the click-through rates for some keywords. Keywords that show up in real-time searches show spike in overall search volume. Thus, it would be reasonable to imply more clicks than 'expected' across the board (organic, real-time, PPC).

Short term trends aside, Google’s real time search innovation has the potential to be an exciting one for both consumers and advertisers. For marketers, Google’s real time search could offer an enticing way by which they could micro-target consumers. And for consumers, real time search adds an important aggregation point for the massively expanding real time data. However, for Google to make real time search work they will need to understand how to integrate real time feeds into core SERP results. For instance, when one searches for “Golden Gate Bridge” at 6:30 AM on Monday when traffic is terrible, the person will want real time data and photos not a history of the golden gate bridge from Wikipedia. Further, from the advertiser side, it will be important to create ads that are extremely time sensitive and relevant.

Google has made good progress on the geo-targeting side but the time sensitivity has not been fully addressed. In display exchanges, you can adjust pricing real time using RTB but such flexibility doesn’t exist in search yet. Such capabilities will have to come to real time search to make it relevant for advertisers. Advertisers will need very sophisticated platforms such as ours to be successful at this as the scalability and automation requirements will jump many fold. At Efficient Frontier, we are building several innovations around Real Time Search. For example, we are looking at time series data patterns algorithmically to identify spikes in real-time searches for keywords that our advertisers are buying on SEM. This will help us predict campaign performance with greater accuracy. Another way we are innovating is by generating new keywords for advertisers by processing tweets and real-time feeds.

Real time everything is certainly here to stay, It’s an important trend to watch for the longer term.

Comments

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