shorebreak - 6:16 pm on Feb 26, 2008 (gmt 0)

With Google's stock down 10% in the last 48 hours on Comscore data showing decreasing click volumes in search, acknowledging a few truths as we think about the possible Automatic Matching beta seems appropriate:

1)Advertisers need growth, and matching broader than Exact Match serves an advertiser need. However, best practice is not to rely on Broad Match, EBM or Automatic Matching; best practice is to diligently build large keyword lists with the mix of Exact, Phrase and Broad that ROI data supports, as described well recently by Rimm-Kaufman Group on SEL:
[url]http://searchengineland.com/080225-000100.php[/url]

Likewise, the corollary to (1) above is that Broad Match, EBM and this new Automatic Matching are, as I believe AWA would concur, not match types advertisers should depend on and in lieu of the hard work that goes with (1).

2) As has been shown by people much smarter than me, broader matching options have the pernicious effect of getting more advertisers more directly in competition with each other, which benefits Google directly and certainly moreso than would be the case if advertisers held to strategy (1) more often [I highly recommend Blogation's take on this phenomena: [blogation.net ]. Google is a business whose #1 goal is to make money, and I would love - just once - for a Google employee to acknowledge this self-evident reality of the broad matching options they have introduced rather than stick to the utopian BS (IMHO) that management feeds them and they in turn feed us. Frankly, we're not idiots and shouldn't be treated as such; the SEM community can have a more productive discussion with the search engines around match types if and only if the SE's themselves acknowledge that yield maximization guides them morally just as much as 'Do No Evil'. Interestingly, they do just that on their investor earnings calls, so why not here?

3) Free markets have always been - and forever will be - more efficient than governed markets. When you have 77% marketshare stateside and 84-92% in Europe, introducing an opt-out feature that goes against (1) [laissez-faire SEM?] is market manipulation. It's G's right to do that obviously, but boy wouldn't it be better for the continued health and longevity of the SEM industry (and G within it) for Google to stick with the more difficult but high-quality path? Help every advertiser find his/her right match strategy, forgo short-term profits for long-term viability, and fanatically supportthe analytics and SEM community rather than undermine them with free products that blatantly leverage G's monopoly.

4) This strategy of focusing on helping brand advertisers' agencies spend bigger budgets in search is a good one, but you can't suck a chicken through a straw. Google should take the more difficult path of helping brand advertisers understand the strategy and tactics for translating offline business goals into scalable campaigns that target demographics through search activity.

[[b]edited by: shorebreak at 6:19 pm (utc) on Feb. 26, 2008]