Will Ad Targeting Affect Organic SEO?
Just before the weekend, Google announced that they were finally making their browsing history ad targeting an official feature available to all. Put simply, the system looks at a browser’s cookies to see the pages they’ve previously visited, how often they’ve visited them and how recently. Then, Google uses this data to display more relevant ads, or at least those more relevant to the pages you’ve visited recently.
But isn’t this just a PPC concern?
While this feature is primarily associated with Google’s display network, as accessed through its pay per click programme, there is one big consideration for organic SEO – users can choose to display their ads on organic search result pages.
This means that when you conduct a search on Google from now on, the paid ads that you’re presented with are likely to be more relevant and more enticing as a result. If this system works, more users will be drawn from clicking organic SERPs by the ads at the side of them, thus reducing the CTR of all organic optimisation.
Ok, so maybe I’m taking this to the Nth degree, but it occurs to me that the better paid search does in terms of clicks, the less there is for organic listings, right? There’s only one apple, and if adwords is taking a bigger bite, then organic is going to go hungry. As an SEO consultant wishing to quantify a client’s monthly ROI, this could result in depleted traffic figures and a bit of a headache.
It’s not only on Google search results that this could be an issue either. That’s because, even if people are clicking more ads on the display network (various sites with ad space reserved for PPC customers) as a result of this browser based functionality, it still means they’re not searching as much. For example, if I go to fixmyhairnow.com looking for hair dye (bad in joke) and don’t find it, I’ll invariably run a Google search for it instead, and will click the most relevant organic listing. But if this new feature is successful, before I’d had chance to run my search I would have been presented with a relevant ad on fixmyhairnow.com. I would have clicked this ad, been taken to the site and purchased my product there. This process cuts search out completely, and could result in decreased organic search volumes in future.
I think that realistically, this whole issue would only become a problem if this new browsing history based search functionality really took off with a bang. In all likelihood, only if the ads were absolutely spot on 99% of the time would enough traffic be drawn from organic search to render it a problem to agencies and SEO consultants. The browser based ad targeting is also opt out, so many people will disable it and rely solely on generic ads and organic results.
It will be interesting to see the implications, and you never know, it might be worth dusting off that copy of PPC from Scratch just in case.
