Google SearchWiki was launched in November of 2008 with the purpose of personalizing searches and providing an opportunity to share comments among Google users regarding websites and search results. Since then, many SEM experts have been asking themselves, “where is Google going with this?” As with any new innovation, this new feature comes with pros and cons.

Danny Sullivan moderated a session with Corey Anderson, a Google engineer, on Wiki Search at the 2009 SMX West conference. The two of them managed to evoke many interesting points of discussion. According to Google’s representative, the personalized rankings (Wiki Search) are not currently being taken into consideration for Google’s primary search results. So, for all of you who started asking your friends and family to move your website into the number 1 position in their wiki searches, according to Google, this currently has no influence on the rankings. However, the possibility of these personalized rankings having an effect on search results has not been ruled out for the future.

One apparent negative impact Google’s SearchWiki will have on SEM professionals is the difficulty that will come with gathering ranking data and drawing identifiable comparisons from analytics data based on those rankings, as an individual’s personalized rankings will play a part in this traffic. Ultimately, search rankings will become of much less importance if this does become a reality.

On the other hand, Google will open up the competition with personalized rankings, as domain age will be an unlikely factor in how an individual searcher ranks sites in their personal listings. This will present the opportunity for new ecommerce and informational sites with high relevancy to a search topic to appear in the top rankings, as searchers will have the ability to judge what is the most relevant, regardless of the age of the domain.

This last point could ultimately be a plus for all web users. In order to gain rankings, website owners will be forced to include content relevant to the user rather than building sites primarily for the search engines. Users will now be choosing the websites they want to visit repeatedly, and this will inform Google which sites are meeting the needs of what a user is searching for. Google will be giving more control to the visitors and therefore, websites must be created with the primary goal of appealing to their target audience.

At this point, you may be asking yourself, “but what about spamming with negative or positive comments to remove your competitors?” Google made it clear that they will be reviewing the comments very carefully to avoid any red flag or black hat motives. This will hopefully ensure that this type of spamming will not be a problem to your website’s rankings.

Whether you like it or not, Google is constantly gathering information from everything you are searching for, regardless if you are logged in or not. Currently, Google alerts you when a search result has been customized according to previous searches and your location. However, many people may not realize that even when Google doesn’t inform you that the results have been customized, they may have been, most likely in a less obvious way. In certain instances, it is better to avoid user confusion rather than alert the user to these results.

Currently, Google is testing this Wiki functionality for their PPC ad space as well. While this is currently an issue that SEO folks are working to solve, PPC should also be paying close attention, as this will most likely effect how quality scores and bid prices will be determined in the future.

The World Wide Web is becoming more personal on a daily basis, and if websites are not prepared to handle this, they will no longer be able to effectively compete in the same search space that they may have previously dominated in the past.

The Paid Search world was in a tizzy last week over the announcement of Google’s beta testing for its new Automatic Matching (AM) feature for AdWords. Below is Google’s explanation of the tools’ functions, and just for fun, see if you can guess what two words triggered the uproar.

“Automatic Matching automatically extends your campaign’s reach by using surplus budget to serve your ads on relevant search queries that are not already triggered by your keyword lists. By analyzing the structure and content of your website and AdWords campaigns, we deliver more impressions and clicks while maintaining your current CTRs and CPCs.”

So with the news that Google would be using advertiser’s “surplus budget” to fund this feature, the paid search blogosphere exploded with claims that Google will inevitably thrust a money-grab onto its advertisers. Compounding these claims was the ComScore report that came out a day before the AM tool was announced showing Google’s advertisements in the US last month were down 0.3% year-on-year.

So is this a money-grab, or is this just remarkably bad timing for a feature that could benefit Adwords advertisers? In an attempt to reason with the angry mob I’ve listed some quick pros and cons. Hopefully this post will save a liquor store or two.

PRO: This is only a beta test that a small, select number of advertisers are using, and can opt out of at any time. In fact I think this is the biggest pro of them all because after feedback is given, Google can either tweak AM’s problems or ultimately scrap the tool leaving it in the same boat as Googlesheets.

CON: Relevance is not measured by the advertiser. In an example as to how the feature works Google states: “If you sold Adidas shoes on your website, Automatic Matching would automatically crawl your landing page and target your campaigns to queries such as: “shoes” “adidas” “athletic”, etc., and less obvious ones such as “slippers” that our system has determined will benefit you and likely lead to a conversion on your site.” While I’m sure the AM does not override negative keyword listings will the potential leads/sales for unrelated search terms without a bid be worth an individual advertiser’s spend?

PRO: Relevance is not measured by the advertiser. While paid search vets think they can out smart a machine (and most can), a regular mom and pop user with limited experience is usually bidding on a small amount of keywords because they simply do not know any better.

CON: If an AM search result click does not turn into a lead or sale, it’s ultimately Google’s fault, and you end up paying for their mistake

PRO: The AM queries will appear on you search reports, which in turn will provide a source of untapped keywords to monetize.

CON: Nearly the same results can be gleaned by using Google’s keyword research tool without having to risk your budget’s surplus.

PRO: There has never been a time when AdWords has forced advertisers to use a feature that directly benefits their bottom line.

Yes, AM does siphon funds out of a budget surplus, but if you choose to add this feature it’s ultimately your decision. Furthermore Google states that, “AM will never exceed your budget.” While results of this test will more than likely vary across the board I’m sure a certain amount of advertisers (probably small time) will find this tool helpful, while other, experienced advertisers will choose to opt out and run their own campaign.

We extended the previous test for Client B so that the data for the same time period was pulled down over a number of days. The hypothesis is that the data might change over time as Google performs analysis on invalid clicks and such. This theory did not hold up in the test:

We also ran a similar test for another client whose website focuses on B2B lead generation (hereafter Client C). Again, the data was remarkably consistent:

The net-net is that all tests to date are showing remarkable consistency in the data coming out of the AdWords API. It is much more consistent than I had expected, in fact.

Continuing our series on Google AdWords API Data Consistency, we repeated yesterday’s test this morning, this time with a B2C lead generation client (hereafter Client B). Unfortunately, the results from this test were infinitely worse.

Fortunately, the results were still pretty darn good:

All the stats had settled out completely by 3am, and were quite close to actuals by 2am. Impressive.

For some time, we have seen a rumor floating around that data downloaded via the Google AdWords API can fluctuate for the first day or so after it is created. One theory is that it takes time for all the data to be registered from the various data centers.

To test the validity of this theory, we pulled the pervious day’s clicks, costs and impressions down hourly for one of our smaller B2C clients (hereafter Client A). The first download of data occurred at 2am central time. The actual data pulled is as follows:

Looks remarkably consistent to me!

To be fair, more testing is needed. We intend to look at a number of clients and to pull data for a number of time periods. We also plan to pull data for the same time period over a number of days to see how it changes (perhaps as click fraud analysis is completed).

Early indications are, however, that Google is doing a fine job on data integrity.