Digital Marketing - Google Instant's Three Second Rule

After the launch of Google Instant in 2010, the importance of staying ahead of your competitors in search cannot be emphasized enough. Although Google has been promoting Instant as a product which enables users to search at a faster pace, they are more likely to care about the volume of traffic being brought in by increased PPC activity, than anything else. With Instant, both search results and paid advertisements are displayed at a furious pace, which is expected to increase the amount of clicks, substantially.;

With digital marketing experts expressing fears of being charged for rapidly changing impressions, Google made a statement in which they defined a 'three second rule'. According to this rule, only ads that are displayed for a minimum of three seconds will be counted as an ad impression. This rule is based on the notion that it takes about three seconds for a user to read and understand a particular message.

This rule is useful because if the volume of impressions of an ad increases at a greater rate than the clicks, the efficiency of the digital marketing campaign being conducted will not be questioned. The Google quality score formula that considers how the impression was displayed, and the definition of an impression, has also been modified for Instant. These changes have ensured that the launch of Google Instant had a minimal effect on digital marketing campaigns.

When it comes to natural search, these modifications only emphasize why search engine optimization has become even more imperative for digital marketing strategies. If a particular company is already using SEO to promote their brand, and is generating good revenues, they should do fine. To them, Instant will only serve as a sharp reminder of the importance of SEO.

Google Instant has made title tags and meta-descriptions even more important, as the content in these two tags are always displayed on search engine result pages. When a searcher runs a search, this is the first information they will see about a brand, which may either result in them visiting the link, or going somewhere else. Moreover, brand visibility within this new data stream has the possibility of magnifying the success of major advertisers running huge digital marketing campaigns, and lessening the significance of smaller players.

Of course, this all depends on the behaviour of users who use Google Instant to search for information on the Internet. Almost all digital marketing professionals are looking forward in anticipation to learn how Google Instant develops over the next year. With Google Instant already launched on mobile phones in some countries, the user interface is expected to play an important role in the way consumers use the search engine. The search landscape is constantly changing, and Google Instant only highlights why it should be closely watched by digital marketing professionals.

Qudos Digital is a leading digital marketing agency and can be contacted on 020 8891 2077 or info@qudosdigital.co.uk.

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