Google AdWords Skews Search Results

Google AdWords is Google’s advertising system (how they make money). Google AdWords is a way for advertisers to bid on various keywords so their ads will appear in Google’s search results. It’s an effective way for businesses to get traffic to their sites. Depending on how competitive the keywords are, they can be auctioned off creating a bidding war. Placement of the ad is determined by a business’ ad rank which is made up by the maximum bid times their quality score. The highest ad rank will get the first ad position and so on down the list.

So how does this come in to play when people are using Google search? The marketing blog, quicksprout.com, offers an interesting post on keyword research with Google AdWords by Neil Patel. He talks about three ways on how people perform keyword searches and how AdWords interacts with them to alter search results.

The first way people perform keyword searching on the author’s list is user intent: you perform a search to accomplish something. Google understands that and the longer the search query the more targeted the results. In the example Patel uses, “order a birthday cake” v. “girls birthday cake Cinderella delivery atlanta ga” it can become quite focused.

The second way people search on the list is by type of search query. The three basic types of searches people perform are informational, transactional, and navigational. The three types are broken out in the article like this:

• Informational: The purpose is to gather information.
• Transactional: The purpose is to carry out a web-based activity.
• Navigational: The purpose is to reach a specific website or page.

Out of the three, an informational query is, by far, the most performed type of search.

Demographic research was the third on the list. This one seemed a little more subjective and harder for a search engine algorithm to identify. An example given was the search terms “Amazon books for teenage girls” – it could be a teenage girl, or a parent of a teenage girl. It could also be a boyfriend, uncle… The point is, the computer can only speculate a demographic, it is up to the advertiser to narrow down the keywords to identify their true client and make sure every keyword used is something that demographic is searching for. The advertiser will be less successful if they go too board with their keywords.

Understanding this from a user’s point of view will help understand what is being displayed in the results list. Even while information gathering is the most common search executed advertisers understand this and will still skew results toward their advertisement based on the research and mechanisms available within Google AdWords.