Google wants to automate search marketing by looking beyond keywords. As the term adwords indicates it is based on the concept of keywords. An advertiser has to bid on a set of keywords that closely match what their customers type in the search box. But there are potential advertisers such as plumbers, handyment etc that do not know what a keyword is or how to go about using adwords. Google wants to tap into those type of advertisers by offering a system that doesn’t need bidding on keywords.
“Keywords work very, very well, but we think we can do better,” Nicholas Fox, the business product management director for Google AdWords, said in an afternoon keynote here today at the Search Engine Strategies conference. Fox said Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) was investing in approaches that wouldn’t require keywords.
“It’s hard to say how that will work out, but we’re doing continued investment and research,” he said, adding that there’s a huge opportunity for Google, its partners and competitors to “revolutionize search.”
“Imagine if I’m a plumber in San Jose and I fix sinks and toilets, and Google could automatically match you to the users you’re looking for,” Fox said.
He gave another example of an electronics Web site. “What if I could just point Google to my site and have it crawl the site and automatically build targeted ads matched to queries?”
Fox gave no timetable or indication of how far along Google might be in presenting such a system.
It makes sense though it remains to be seen how well such a system can work.