Googles Business Bubble Ads
Back in November Google began showing adwords ads within the local business bubble that appears when a consumer is looking for a local business. This new approach of showing relevant ads has made many local florist uneasy with their local listing showing national companies with in their business listings.
Over the past few months we have noticed that consumers that have called our shop have been thinking that they where calling xyz florist and since we do advertise our business by targeting other cities when consumers are looking for a florist to deliver flowers we assumed that perhaps they were getting confused by our ads. Even though our ads clearly show our business name and that we deliver to the city there was still something wrong with how our ads were being interpreted.
Last week as I was trying to discover what could be causing this problem and also noticing that our conversions to our website sales were declining I started to gather information from our website access logs to find out what was going on. When I did this I noticed a search term for another florist that caught my eye and began to test it to see how the consumer could possibly think they where calling this other florist and discovered our own ad appearing within the business bubble when doing a search on google maps.
Ads appearing on the left side of the google map page was nothing new however seeing the ad appearing within the local business bubble could easily fool the consumer into thinking they where calling this other shop.
I also noticed that the search term was something new that our ad would normally not appear until around the same time Google began to show these ads within the local business bubble towards that end of November.
I know that I can remove our ads by using negative keywords however this is yet another time consuming task. Its a shame that we need to see competitors ads within our business listing and I know since day one business names have always been a target of ads beginning with the yellowpages and online directories using business names to get traffic to their own sites and then showing a bunch of competitor ads. Google has a great thing going and I am unsure why they would be looking for yet another revenue stream but clearly this new way of showing ads within the business bubble will just cause confusion for the consumer while costing precious advertising dollars from local business.
Over the past few months we have noticed that consumers that have called our shop have been thinking that they where calling xyz florist and since we do advertise our business by targeting other cities when consumers are looking for a florist to deliver flowers we assumed that perhaps they were getting confused by our ads. Even though our ads clearly show our business name and that we deliver to the city there was still something wrong with how our ads were being interpreted.
Last week as I was trying to discover what could be causing this problem and also noticing that our conversions to our website sales were declining I started to gather information from our website access logs to find out what was going on. When I did this I noticed a search term for another florist that caught my eye and began to test it to see how the consumer could possibly think they where calling this other florist and discovered our own ad appearing within the business bubble when doing a search on google maps.
Ads appearing on the left side of the google map page was nothing new however seeing the ad appearing within the local business bubble could easily fool the consumer into thinking they where calling this other shop.
I also noticed that the search term was something new that our ad would normally not appear until around the same time Google began to show these ads within the local business bubble towards that end of November.
posted by Everyday Flowers | 9:28 AM
3 Comments:
I couldn't agree with you more on this one. It's a shameful way to generate income for Google when they are continually harping about providing quality content for their users, this smalls like confusion for the consumer.
I'm hoping that they will undo this in the near future!
They may very well undo it. Every few weeks, Google makes changes to their search engine code. Hard to keep up and unfortunately, each change they make, impacts everyone in 1 way or another.
What if all the info in the bubble, except title, comes from the competitor?
In our case, we have the company title taken from our google places listing and the rest is ONLY info from the competitor adwords - makes us look silly and falsely impersonates our brand and company. I suppose this was the reason google got into legal trouble before. We have to take this further.
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