Rob Berrisford.com

So the shit hit the fan this morning on Google with all trademarked bidding now being allowed. This was supposed to happen yesterday but it seems the flood gate only came down this morning.

I appears that Google have added all competitor keywords to their broad match. So if Apple is a broad match of Orange, now it would seem Vodafone is a broad match of BT, Apple, Woolworths and Dell. I very much doubt that Vodafone have gone out and targeted keywords like Woolworths and Dell, so Google inflicting broad match is my only explanation.

It will be interesting to see how this pans out. The Vodafone CTR on terms like Dell must be pretty low meaning they will get some high minimum bids pretty quickly. Will the big traditional search agencies keep hammering it? Chasing after every click and every £ over ride?

When will people run out of budget if they are getting enough clicks to stay in the space?

I suspect Google wont benefit from this in the long term. The search space is a mess today, they may be making more money per click but if the sponsored search listings bring up largely irrelevant results will users be more likely to click on the organics than ever before? That would be my guess.

Then again the Americans have been running on this system for a few years and it obviously hasn’t hurt Google over there.

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