Once in a while, Google makes an appearance in the news and dominates the blogs with half angry and half praiseworthy articles. Last week, Google publicly announced it’s new privacy policy, which will roll out in March, and though some people were angry about it, everyone has come to terms with it by now. Really, it’s nothing new. Google will now basically combine all of its existing privacy policies for its many products and services (like Google+, Gmail, Gmail Calendar, YouTube…). Google has actually kind of being doing this already. Going as far back as 2005, Google has stated the following in its policies:
“We may combine the information you submit under your account with information from other Google services or third parties in order to provide you with a better experience and to improve the quality of our services.”
Last week they took it one step further and freed themselves of multiple (but similar) policies and rolled them all up into one. Let’s keep in mind that Google’s revenue stream is first and foremost through advertisement. So, let’s get to seeing what this means for the Pay Per Click industry.
The most important benefit of this new change for PPC is the fact that Google will eventually be able to give us more accurate information regarding the consumers we are trying to target. As Account Managers, we are always looking for ways to better target our users and widen our audience. The combination of Google+ with the other Google services allow us to use targeting not only based on who Google guesses the user is, but on actual facts based on the users profile.
Furthermore, this new change will also allow PPC Managers to expand our current market. One way that we will be able to do this will be through better interest category marketing for the display network. For example, in addition to Google pulling information from your Google+ profile (making targeting very similar to that of Facebook, by the way) and leaving cookies on the users browser from the different websites they’ve visited, Google will also be able to let us know what videos that same person is watching (YouTube) or where that person is possibly traveling to (Google Calendar) in the near future.
Now, imagine someone from Florida has on their calendar that they will be visiting Chicago in the next month during the winter. If Google allows for granular targeted advertising, we could start advertising snow clothes, travel recommendation, and hotels/accommodation in Chicago to that person before they even step into the city! How great would that be? Please share your thoughts on how else this new combination of privacy policies can be beneficial for PPC!
