Google’s long awaited entry into the virtual world has taken place in the last week with the launch of their competitor to Second Life, lively.com.  According to the Google blog the initial idea came as they “looked around the social web and wished that it could be less static”.  I’m not quite buying that seen as Second Life has been around for a while now but that
doesn’t mean it isn’t an interesting entrant.  Much like in Second Life you create an avatar for yourself although in Lively.com this is in more of a cartoon vein and in more of a Sims fashion.  You can also create your own rooms within the world and customise their look and decoration.  You can then hang out with your friends in the rooms you create, which brings in the social element.    The interesting part comes with how and where you engage with lively.com.   The system enables you to embed your room into your blog or website, and interact with it directly without the need to visit lively.com.  Whether this is enough of a selling point I am not sure but lively.com will certainly appeal to the youth market more than Second Life and lets face it, the younger generation are much more likely to spend ours chatting to friends online, even more so if they create a cool avatar for themselves in the process.  I was never a big fan of Sims, and never really got into Second Life, so I don’t think Ill be rushing along to set my account up.  But if the Alexa rankings below are anything to go by lively.com could create a bit of a stir in the world of social media.

The finance comparison market has been a very lucrative and successful one over the past 5 years and it seems that Google has finally decided that it wants a piece of the pie! The screenshot below is taken from a Google UK search for secured loan (interestingly it only worked in IE and not in Firefox) and shows the Google Merchant Search function appearing above all PPC listings with drop down functionality allowing the user to select their desired loan amount before they even leave the SERP. Once an option is selected the user is taken to the Google Merchant page with their options shown based on the original selection, much like with all the other comparison sites in the market.

At the moment it appears this is just in Beta on the secured loan keyword but surely if successful this will be rolled out onto all other financial products. I couldn’t see where Google was getting these results from, and so I am not even sure if the providers know they are being compared (although I assume they are aware) and there is not indication of how a company would get its products listed, although this could just be a closed beta for now.

This could have massive implications for the comparison market, above and beyond the fact that there is another competitor in the market. In the first instance they have knocked moneysupermarket off the top PPC listing which will impact their volume, I am assuming they are not paying themselves a premium CPC for this position! They are also allowing themselves much more prominence on the page than a standard listing. 49 characters for a title and drop down functionality make it stand out on the page. Users could also see this as an easier option than clicking through a link and going through the whole process on a separate engine.

On top of this, if the beta is successful, what is to stop them adding in a variable to quality score which penalises other comparison sites? In one fell swoop generating themselves both more revenue from the sites willing to pay more and reducing the prominence of these sites and so driving more volume through their own tool. I may be a cynic but I can see it happening. Moneysupermarket spend a lot of money with Google but if they see a bigger opportunity in doing it themselves then they will surely pursue this avenue instead.

Is this the end of independent comparison sites? No, I doubt it, but if/when the beta is expanded it could be a big dent in their revenues and they will have to think of other ways to differentiate themselves. Some insurers (direct line to name one) are already boycotting the comparison sites and if Google is to offer this service for free, which they may well do in the name of stickiness and keeping people within the Google realm, more could follow suit.

Google has announced that it will now be accepting 3^rd party ad serving tags for its placement targeting network in the US and has plans to roll this out in the UK in the near future.  This is a big step for them and no doubt is linked to the double click acquisition in some way.  The Google Image ads network has long been a no go area for media planners due in no small part to the fact they didn’t accept 3^rd party tags.  This announcement could mean a big growth spurt for the network as it should attract more advertisers which in turn should attract more publishers and also publishers of a higher quality.  I would argue that Google needs to clean up their network a little in order to improve quality but you cant dispute the fact they have a large number of sites on board in a large number of verticals which could be tempting for the niche advertisers trying to build an effective media plan.  There’s no doubt the ability to select individual sites, the flexible pricing and now the acceptance of 3^rd party tags makes Google a viable option for future media plans and one good media planners should investigate.

So after all the hoopla about Google removing the trademark protection from its Adwords system (of which I only got chance to write about once as I was too busy doing something about it at work!) what was the outcome?  The removal happened on Monday (bank holiday, coincidence? I think not) while most of us were enjoying the good weather or a badly played round of golf in my case.  You can be damn sure there were no affiliates out on the golf course as they were all in-doors getting on as many brand terms as possible to make the most of the changes.

The net affect from what I have seen is the obvious rise in brand ownerships CPCs (about 30-60p increase on average) which is a big deal if you are somebody who relies no their brand sales to bring down the overall cost of the medium.   Affiliates and clued up competitors are having a field day at the moment with not many people following Tesco’s moral stance of not bidding on competitors terms.  I personally think it will all begin to die down as people realise the inflated CPCs they are going to have to pay to bid on competitors terms due to their lack of quality score will see a lot of them decide it is not worth the bother.  But many companies are going to have to review their affiliate strategy and make sure they have clear guidelines on what is allowed and what isn’t otherwise they will end up paying out a small fortune to affiliates who are doing nothing more than brand bidding.

So Google have finally done it.  Sacrificed their morals on trademark protection in the name of more revenue by opening up all brand terms, whether registered trademarks or not, to anybody who chooses to bid on them.  This has been their system in the US and Canada for a while now and their arguement is that it provides a better user experience by offering the searcher companies which provide the same product or service as the one whose trademark they have searched for.  The changes will come into play on May 5th and from this point any advertiser will be free to bid for any brand terms they choose.  Fittingly this is a bank holiday in the UK and so the mayhem which will undoubtedly unfold will do so when the majority of industry representatives are away from work!  If you remember what happened when Google made changes to their minimum bid system (and it all went t*ts up!) it makes you wonder whether this date has been set intentionally by the big G.

So cue brands bidding on other brands, hiking the prices out of spite and affiliates of a field day.  But will this be the case?  No doubt initially companies will begin to bid on their competitors terms thus raising the price the brand owner has to pay.  But how will the quality score deal with this? Well you would like to think the competition will have to pay hefty minimum CPCs to even list in the first place given that their websites will have no relevancy at all to the keyword.  But will the big boys care about this?  They will probably be more concerned with stealing their competitors traffic and be willing to pay the price. 

Theoretically they wont be able to include the trademarked term in their creative but that doesn’t account for DKI which, no matter what Google suggest, isn’t going to change any time soon to combat this.  Therefore a clever search engine marketeer will get round this quite easily.

What do I think will happen?  Brand CPC’s increase, affiliates have a field day, the overall cost of PPC increases, and then when it all dies down it is back to business as usual and people forget the day brand protection was in place.  The trick is for companies to have a plan of action for May 5th, to know how they are going to deal with their affiliates, to develop and stance on competitors terms and closely monitor the first couple of weeks after this change comes into place.  Then to reassess and get on with the business of generating leads from paid search, after all we are all at the mercy of Google anyway, so why bother trying to fight it!