Google Quietly Rolls-Out “In-Market Buyers” Targeting To Reach Imminent Purchasers

Though it hasn’t been officially announced, Google has started rolling out a new targeting feature on the Google Display Network in AdWords called In-Market Buyers. Listed under Interest Categories, the new In-Market Buyers segments are designed to target visitors whose site visitation habits suggest they are in active-consideration mode and want to make a purchase.
Advertisers can target consumers who are further down in the funnel and considering buying a product or service like theirs. David Szetela, Owner & CEO of paid search agency FMB Media, spotted the quiet roll-out in several of his client accounts yesterday and provided the screenshot below. Szetela says he has started an early test using the Boats & Watercraft category of In-Market Buyers for a boat lighting client. “Google says they have figured out how to identify people who want to make a purchase. So it’s targeting people, not sites, based on their site behavior,” said Szetela.

Consumers who visit a site too frequently are typically not considered in-market buyers. For example, Google has found that a user who visits an car site frequently may already be an owner and is not likelyconsidering a purchase in the near future. Based on the patterns Google has identified, the In-Market Buyer segments actually target visitors who are frequenting certain sites less frequently.
Google’s support page on Interest Categories has been updated to include information about In-Market Buyers:

• In-market buyers (available only to campaigns targeting English): Select from these categories to find customers who are researching products and actively considering buying a service or product like those you offer.These categories are designed for advertisers focused on getting conversions from highly qualified customers. “In-market buyers” categories can help drive remarketing performance and reach consumers close to completing a purchase.

Google recommends bidding on these segments can be done on a CPA basis to tie it to actual sales. CPC bidding is also available for advertisers that can’t use bid on a CPA basis. CPC bidding is not recommended. Google also suggests not adding other targeting methods to ad groups set with In-Market Buyers, but instead setting bid adjustments based on demographics or by specific topic. An example given for an automotive advertiser is in the in-market category “Sedans,” to set a bid adjustment for people within that audience who also happen to be browsing pages related to the topic “Autos & Vehicles.”
This is early days, of course, so you may find your own ways of using this new targeting feature. Again, this is still rolling out and hasn’t even been announced officially, so you may not see it in your accounts, yet.

Introducing the new Opportunities tab: find more ways to improve your AdWords performance

Adwords launched the Opportunities tab in 2009 as your personal AdWords assistant, surfacing insights to help you improve your performance in AdWords. Today they are announcing the new Opportunities tab. They have added several new opportunity types and made each easier to understand. Now the Opportunities tab is even better at answering the question, “What else can I do to improve my performance in AdWords?”

The new Opportunities tab

New high-impact opportunities

  They have added several new opportunity types for more ways to improve your performance.

• Convert more customers in your best locations: If your conversion rate differs across locations, you might see opportunities to increase your location bid adjustment where your conversion rate is high, or decrease your location bid adjustments where your conversion rate is low. 
• Get more out of your existing budget: If you’re maxing out your budget, you might see opportunities to lower your bids to capture more clicks.
• Be there more often than competitors: If your ads are being seen less frequently than other advertisers competing for the same traffic, you might see opportunities to be seen more frequently with bids to show more often than advertisers like you.
• Show ads that are more relevant: If we spot an ad group with keywords related to lots of different themes, it's harder for you to show a highly relevant ad, so you might see opportunities to create new ad groups from existing keywords.
• Reach more customers on closely related searches: If you're missing clicks on searches that are very similar to your existing keywords, you might see opportunities to broaden your keyword match types.
• Be seen on the first page: If your ads are showing below the first page when users search on high-quality keywords, you might see opportunities to raise your bids to show ads on the first page. 

Pick your best opportunities

A totally new design makes it easier to decide which opportunities to implement. For each opportunity, you'll see a short summary under "What you can do” and the possible impact under “What you might get each week.” The opportunities you’ll see are tailored to your account and selected based on their possible impact to your performance.

More opportunities are just around the corner

Check the Opportunities tab often. Whether you optimize your campaign once a day or once a month, it's constantly working in the background to spot opportunities for you to improve. And Adwords be adding even more opportunity types over time.

How Recent Organic Search Changes Will Affect Paid Search

Search marketers were pitched not one but two curveballs recently which have forever reshaped the landscape of search engine optimization (SEO).

The industry saw the first one coming a mile away as Google began encrypting organic search queries two years ago. Now, there’s almost zero visibility into the organic keywords which drive visitors to websites (other than what is offered in Google Webmaster Tools).
Understanding the granular relationship between a website and its organic keyword traffic has been the core of modern SEO. Without this deep level of insight, it becomes clear that organic search marketers will have to adjust their approach.
The other major change crept up on the SEO community as the Hummingbird algorithm was live for a month and was a virtual secret until Google announced it in September. This is rather unusual as SEOs have been quick to notice previous, major algorithmic changes the moment they have been introduced. For example, when Google released the Panda update a few years ago, some sites immediately experienced a major drop in traffic and publicized their woes.
Hummingbird focuses on better understanding the concepts within a query rather than relying strictly on the alphanumeric characters and matching them up.
Google provided fairly transparent rationale for both changes. Consumer privacy concerns were at the root of organic search keyword encryption and prompted a larger discussion over what kind of data Web publishers should share outside of their own walls. With Hummingbird, Google hopes to improve search engine results by better discerning the concepts behind a search than ever before. It reportedly works much better with mobile search where consumers using voice search generally input longer queries than typed searches.

The Impact On Paid Search

A complex relationship has existed between paid and organic search ever since the rise of search engine marketing in the late 1990s. The most successful brands have found ways to integrate the two disciplines and connect them as one holistic search engine marketing program. These elite marketers operate with an understanding that when one lever is pushed, it pulls on the other.
One of the initial assumptions discussed in the SEM blogosphere was that these recent natural search changes may drive some SEO budgets to pay-per-click (PPC) search. Well-known search marketer, Eric Enge, CEO of Stone Temple Consulting, hasn’t yet noticed this shift. “While some people may do more PPC as a result of the recent Google changes, we have not seen any mass movement in that direction among our clients,” says Enge.
Advice Interactive Group’s VP of Media, Shelley Ellis, feels there may have been some business motivations behind some of these moves. “Shortly after the first time SEO encryption was announced around May of 2010, I predicted that part of Google’s reasoning behind that decision might have something to do with the future of search remarketing on Google AdWords,” Ellis explains. “I found it interesting that Google’s recent announcement or update on this element of SEO coincided with Google’s search remarketing coming out of beta (now available to all advertisers).”

Will Budgets Migrate?

Only time will tell if some portion of SEO budgets will migrate to paid search campaigns. For now, SEOs seem to be contemplating how their approach needs to change in order to roll with the punches. One of the action items is to get more integrated with PPC counterparts to supplement the data loss from encrypted search.
“It used to be that SEO pushed keyword information to PPC but, with SEO keyword encryption, now the SEO teams are asking for information from the paid media teams,” says Ellis. “Through analytics and matched search queries, we can now break down the types of keyword searches that brought a searcher to specific PPC landing pages.”
Paid search marketers may find their approach evolving as well. With Google now matching search queries slightly differently than before, there could be some useful insights from organic search on how to best to target and message consumers.
“Hummingbird’s push toward better understanding a user’s intent during a search may cause publishers to focus more themselves on building pages and PPC campaigns around user intent, as well,” says Enge. “That won’t happen overnight, but I can see it happening over time.”
There’s no doubt it’s key to tap into Google’s deep understanding of what consumers really want from their searches. Before Hummingbird, it was all about matching alphanumeric strings, so many paid search marketers may not have paid much attention to user intent. Now, as Google applies its Knowledge Graph for better organic search results, paid marketers can leverage these insights as valuable market research.
Paid and organic search are the yin and yang to the bigger puzzle that is search engine marketing. Whatever impacts one, may impact the other. Although the long-term effect that these recent organic changes will have on both may not be known for some time, search marketers can only act in the short term and hope for the best. It would make sense for each side of the lake to stay connected – there’s a good chance that the ripples and waves from one will certainly be felt by the other.