As we all know, Google dominates search and continues to increase its share of searches.  The latest Nielson Online data has Google garnering 60.2% of searches and 16% year over year growth.  That translates into a significant amount of additional revenue for Google’s already deep pockets. 

In order to continue to increase their revenue from search, they will either have to increase their revenue per search or continue to steal market share away from their competitors…or both.  Are they really going to continue to increase their search share and eventually end up with a 70%…80%…or even a higher share?  Maybe, but Google is not dumb and knows that they’ll need additional sources of revenue in the future.

That is why they are constantly putting out their feelers to determine new sources of revenue, which critics often refer to as a waste of money.  I’d generally disagree with that assessment, especially since they are in a position now to have the luxury to experiment. 

One area that Google seems to be experimenting in is the Google content network in AdWords.  They are constantly releasing new features that make it more transparent and give advertisers greater control over where their ads are shown and who sees them.

A couple weeks ago, they announced the set of enhancements to the Google content network.  These latest enhancements, that will be rolled out in the coming months, are a result of the DoubleClick purchase.  The four improvements are:

Frequency Capping – Limit the number of times a user sees your ad on the content network.

Frequency Reporting – Find out how many people see your ads on the content network and on average how many times they are seeing them.

Improved Ads Quality – I’m not exactly sure what this feature is, but it sounds like Google is saying they will be able to use the additional data to improve the quality of the ads that are shown on the content network.

View-Through Conversions – Find out how many visitors came to their site after viewing one of their ads on the content network.

These enhancements will give advertisers more control over who sees their ads and give them additional metrics they can use to optimize the content network.  They will first have to hope that advertisers - who had given up on the content network because of how poor much of the traffic can often be - are willing to use the new features and begin to allocate some of their budget to the content network.

If they do utilize the content network and Google is able to drive high quality traffic from the content network, then Google could begin to significantly increase their revenue from the content network.  It will be a slow process and only time will tell if these and other enhancements really do improve revenue for Google and its advertisers.

Filed under: PPC on Thursday, August 21st, 2008 by Nate Linnell |
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