It's True - Google Improves Ad Targeting...

This post is from from my other blog here

A significant targeting improvement to the Google advertising platform is in the wings.Google has confirmed that they're running tests on the AdWords platform which see it relying on more than just the current search query to determine which ads to display. The search giant openly admitted using a user's previous query to enhance ad targeting in the past, but now the scope of this behavioral tracking has been expanded.Google gathers a significant amount of data from users as they conduct several searches in their quest to find relevant information. It was only a matter of time before Google utilized this information to help improve the relevance of the ads presented in the SERPs (search engine results page).Confirmation came via some questioning by Saul Hansell from the New York Times. Saul was following up on tests conducted by Gene Munster from Piper Jaffray - which uncovered that ads were being influenced by multiple queries several minutes apart.Nick Fox, a director of Product Management at Google confirmed what the tests had shown. According to Saul's article, Nick had this to say: "We are trying to understand what the user is trying to do right now…In some cases, those queries are ambiguous, so you need a little more context...It is probably not just the previous query that matters...You want to know if the user is still doing the same thing. You wouldn't want to go back a month. You wouldn't want to go back a day. But you may want to go back two or three queries."using broad match keyword targeting and I'm not 100% sure whether Exact Match ads carry greater weighting or less. Either way, the success of ads displayed, based on the previous searches, does not impact Quality Score.The important fact for advertisers is that better targeting generally means better results. Less budget wasted on misguided searches and clicks is a good thing. Expect to hear more about this in the coming months...