Posted:
Monday, June 30, 2014
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In the fantastic Spike Jonze film “Her” a lonely man falls deeply in love with his smartphone’s operating system. We’re not at that point where love could blossom from conversations with a smartphone. Human to computer conversation isn’t quite a two-way street yet. However, with an increase emphasis on hands-free voice search on mobile devices that conversation channel is definitely a one-way street — with us doing all the talking.
Google recently announced that all Andoid powered devices will now respond to the hot word ‘Ok, Google’. Users can initiate a search, control, and carry out any device function by saying the magic words ‘Ok, Google’ first and then asking a question or command such as “Call mom” or “Find the nearest Honda dealership open past 7pm”.
It’s not out of the question to think that voice control/search will soon be the primary way users interact with their mobile devices. With mobile search consuming a larger part of the search traffic pie every year it’s important to prepare your paid search campaigns to deal with this new paradigm shift of how we interact with mobile devices.
Voice control conversational search is very different from traditional typed search queries. With a typed search query a user may search for something like this: “like new 2011 Chevy Malibu”. This same search query as a voice control search may sound very different, but have the same intention: “find me a 2011 Chevy Malibu with leather seats and less than 30,000 miles”.
With type searches we omit various keywords and the ordering of the words may not always have a natural, cognitive flow. The opposite is true for voice search with additional words such as “a”, “for”, and “me” inserted into the search query.
In paid search campaigns this can lead to misses on exact and phrase match keywords. The broad match keywords may cover this , but you may be missing additional context of the search query and may not present the best ad copy or landing page for the voice search query. This could affect metrics such as CTR, conversion rates, and onsite engagement for voice search query searchers. To target for mobile devices it’s important to take into account voice search queries. This mean creating specific ad groups and campaigns for long tail keyword terms that are conversational.
As our interaction with devices continue to evolve it’s important that our PPC strategies evolve along with it.
