Google Adds $5m Per Week With Instant Search

When Google launched Google Instant to the market in September, financial analysts assumed the company designed the predictive search technology to boost search revenues.

Analysts believed Instant, which displays changing results on the fly as users type, would help users conduct quicker searches, leading to more searching on Google, ultimately accelerating search ad revenue.

Search revenue gains

While Google has said it created Instant to improve the user experience, it also appears it is making more money from Instant – about $5 million (£3m) per week extra.

Paid search management platform provider Marin Software found that impressions for paid search ads increased by more than 9 percent while clicks increased by more than 5 percent through the first two weeks of Instant’s existence on Google.com.

Spending rose 2 percent after Instant launched, according to Marin, which compared data for keywords from the two weeks before and after the launch of Google Instant.

Marin, which sampled clients that together manage $1.3bn in paid search spend per year, asserted this is proof people are actually searching and clicking more as a result of Google Instant.

Using Google’s approximate $3.3bn in AdWords revenues for Q3 and Marin’s estimate that AdWords spending was up about 2 percent after Instant launched, Search Engine Land concluded Google pocketed an extra $10m in two weeks from Instant.

User benefits

A Google spokesperson told eWEEK Google wouldn’t comment on “individual firms or campaigns’ performance metrics”.

Instead, he pointed to the comments Jonathan Rosenberg, Google’s senior vice president for product management, made on the company’s third-quarter earnings call 14 October, 12 days before the Marin report.

Unprompted, Rosenberg told financial analysts that the search engine didn’t launch the Google Instant predictive search technology to make more money.

“We launched Instant because it’s so much better for the user. In fact, from a revenue standpoint, its impact has been very minimal; and from a resource standpoint, it’s actually pretty expensive. So why did we do it? Well, we believe from a user standpoint, Instant is outstanding and the data that we are seeing actually bears this out.”

Google may say it didn’t launch Instant expressly to boost search revenues, but Rosenberg and his colleagues had to know it would make more money. It’s straight common sense: More searches on Google.com equals more search ads shown equals more clicks and impressions on AdWords ads.

Marin’s data proves Instant is performing well for Google.

Rosenberg also said Google Instant for mobile will come this fall, and Google delivered that functionality for iPhone 4 and Google Android 2.2 handsets in the United States on 4 November.