AdWords of course is Google’s keyword-based advertising system. When you pick a target keyword that you would like to pair with your ad, your advertising will appear whenever somebody types in your search term into Google (NASDAQ:GOOG). Of course, AdWords is much deeper than this. It also covers display ads and other types of ads. However, for the sake of the discussion in this blog post, I’m going to focus exclusively on the use of keywords for Google AdWords’ search results.
As amazing as AdWords is currently configured, there is still room for improvement. As you probably already know, the advertising revenues that Google has been enjoying from its massive ad network platform has been quite solid over the years. However, Google hasn’t really been aggressive in milking as much profits from this system as possible.
One key way it can do that is to offer more than simple conversion metrics. As it stands, when an AdWords advertiser wants to track a campaign’s success, the advertiser only needs to put a snippet of AdWords’s tracking code in the thank you page of the advertiser sales funnel. The sales funnel of course starts with the ad showing up and the prospect clicking on the ad from Google’s search results. Once the prospect goes on to a sales page, the prospect would enter payment information or drill deep into the content until the person converts. In other words, the person buys something, checks out, or engages in any kind of activity that puts dollars in the pockets of the advertiser. Pretty straightforward. The thank you page is what AdWords tracks.
In the big scheme of things, this has been working well enough. However, if Google is serious about truly providing enough data that would maximize advertisers’ return on investment, it should provide additional information. This information should let advertisers figure out the different intent signals that their content or marketing materials are sending out. This is a crucial piece of information because in many cases, advertisers are actually sending out mixed signals or unclear signals. This has the overall effect of diminishing the effectiveness of the advertisers’ conversion materials. This is exactly the kind of big data reporting technology that can truly turbo charge Google AdWords advertisers’ bottom line. By extension, this can prove to be a bonanza for Google’s AdWords advertising platform’s revenue stream.