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Marketing Pitfalls of Google’s Personalization Realm
By Beth Strukelj | June 1, 2007
Major changes with Google: Universal and being personalized all at the same time. Google Universal has incorporated blogs, videos and news in the organic search results. My colleague Matt has blogged about Universal search in more detail.
But what’s the buzz about personalization? How personal is Google getting? Are they looking for phone numbers, email address or when your next birthday is?
From a search marketing perspective, it’s much more then that - if you’re signed into your Google account and Google collects your data. Bill Slawski describes one scenario of personalized search from an article he wrote for Website Magazine: “What Personalization Means to Search”
I was on the phone with a colleague a few months ago when he identified his highest-ranking competitor for his choice of keywords. I searched using his same terms and could not find the site that he claimed was at the top of the rankings. I asked him to scroll to the top of the Google search page he was viewing, and whether he saw a link labeled sign out at the far right — he did, meaning that he was signed in with Google and his query was being treated a personalized search using his past search history. In a non-personalized search at Google he was actually outranking his competitor’s site, yet it appears that, while signed in to Google, he was visiting his competitors’ pages so often that they were ranking higher for those keywords than his site. Clearly, personalization presents us all with some new challenges.
But how beneficial will that be for Google if a large number of people don’t sign into their Google account? The notion of “relevant” results takes on a whole new meaning.
I’m an avid Google user, but I don’t always sign into my account unless I’m checking emails or reviewing my analytics reports. So I see something entirely different.
So how many more users are not logging in?
It becomes a question of what really is ranking. The top rankings playing field will get distorted as more people use personalized search. Everyone will get a different view depending on what sites they’re checking.
If you’re marketing a website, will you size up your success by what you see when logged in or by what someone else is seeing in the top 10 when they’re not logged in?
Web analytics is the key to this evolving search world? Who is searching for what term? Is it driving traffic to the right page? And is your content compelling enough to make the visitor do what you’ve asked?
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