The PPC Kansas City Shuffle

It’s safe to say that Google has hit the headlines yet again with the launch of Google Instant. The debate in the office on Thursday morning was about Google Instant, our blog post on Thursday morning was about Google Instant, All the other marketing blog posts were about Google Instant and all the News site’s reported on… you guessed it Google Instant.

Reading and listening to all the debates over the latest development from Google drew me to realise everybody is saying the same thing.  Nobody is saying anything different from the person before them or the person after them. What has been achieved is mass communication and publicity based around Google, which is great for Google’s public image and search dominance.

This leads be to question the timing of the release. We know Google works and we work in a medium that changes fast, we’ve become good at adapting very fast to the medium.  Internet marketers will see a good strategy yesterday and will have it bettered by tomorrow. It’s the industry way. One thing that stuck out to me was Google’s own words stating that Instant does not affect the underlying algorithm of paid search ads in any way.

With that in mind, and everybody saying the same thing about the topic I started to wonder how to utilise this to my advantage.

This is where the PPC Kansas Shuffle comes into play. So what is the PPC Kansa Shuffle I hear you ask. A Kansas City Shuffle is when everybody looks right, you go left. Well I have already discussed the market is totally focused on the impact of Google instant. So this leads me to analyse what the other big search engines are up to.

I am looking at Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance. An Experian Hitwise analysis report has shown the combined search share of the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance in the US is 24.56%. With Google having a total of 71.59% searches conducted in the US, the other 60 odd search engines shared just 4.26% between them. The Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance has made them a much bigger player in the market, which makes me question if Google’s latest release is a show of force.

It does not matter to me if it is or it isn’t, I wanted to be ahead of the game in the PPC Search Marketing. So while the rest of the industry is goggling over instant I’ll be monitoring how well the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance will progress.