I was doing some searches today to see if anything was new and exciting with how Google was handling Social Search results and saw something in the Sponsored Links results that’s new to me. I searched for Terralever (the online marketing company I work at) and one of the AdSense results was for another local company, bluemedia.
I haven’t seen Google Ads like this before.
These aren’t geotargeted Ads triggered by the keyword “Terralever.” These ads are different.
Right above the top Ad there’s a heading that says “Related to bluemedia”. That’s new to me. I took a quick glance at the AdWords blog and didn’t see any mention of how “Related to” ads would show up. A few Google searches later and I resigned to the fact that this must be a Google experiment as sometimes the Ads appear and sometimes they don’t. But, there’s a bigger question here.
What’s making these ads show up?
The “Related to…” leads me to believe this is likely based on social ties between our two companies. I can think of a few ways that Google could conclude that Terralever is related bluemedia: Our two companies follow each other on Twitter, individuals from each company link to one other on LinkedIn, each company is a Fan of the other’s Facebook Page, and so on.
Just one more reason to buy AdWords ads?
Either way, this example is pretty innocent. We don’t compete for business with bluemedia. We do, however, communicate and (occasionally) collaborate with competitors in our local community and beyond. If this is a sign of a new trigger for Google displaying AdWords ads, should we tighten down our social ties, or jump in and advertise, too? My guess, assuming this experiment goes live permanently, is that Google hopes we just buck up and buy some ads ourselves.
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Interesting speculation. Did you ever find anything else about this? Did you check other IP’s to see if it was showing up in different locations? I can’t get it to show which leads me to my next question; Were you signed into any google accounts when it happened?
@G-Rod – Checked with a few people at work and beyond and it seems like there’s a reasonable chance that it’s Automatic Matching or a mutation of it that’s being tested.
At our office we’ve got it to fire with and without being logged-in. That said I’m not sure how, when Google is testing, it reacts when one is logged in and sees the behavior and then they subsequently log out because that was the experience we had. Once caches were cleared and new sessions were being used to test it more (logged out of all Google accounts) the behavior had ceased and we couldn’t reproduce it (logged out or in).
We keep testing for it and will keep an eye on it. I’ll report back when I see it again and we can do more testing around it.
Thanks to Elise Redlin-Cook and Allen Kuenn for participating in the conversation of what the behavior might be.