Online platforms progressively blend paid with organic results
Organic and paid results on Google, Bing, Amazon, Facebook, and Co are blending more into each other. In this post, you learn what to do about it.
Until the internet unbundled newspapers, they kept the advertising side of the business strictly separated from the journalistic side. The moral code was so strong, journalists called “the wall”.
That same wall separated organic from paid results on search engines and other online platforms. And just as for newspapers, it's coming down right now and changing the landscape. Organic and paid results blend into each other.
Google
When Google promoted Prabhakar Raghavan to Head of Search, they also made him executive of Google Assistant and... Ads! The long-standing between barrier organic and paid results broke, and looking at the SERPs these days, I see an accurate reflection of that.
One example is "Popular Products", which rolled out earlier this year.
The universal search integration with Google images and the promise to "make search more visual" bear a lot of monetization potential.
Google Maps
Bing
Google is not the only search engine that meshes organic with paid results. Bing's differentiation of paid from organic results in search is now close to zero. Both search engines seem to bank on increasing ad revenue by making ads indistinguishable from organic results, which comes at the cost of user experience (in my opinion).
Amazon
Amazon is mixing paid and organic results when people search for products.
They also provide ad slots on product pages for similar or related products.
Facebook search and messenger
From Tech Crunch:
Facebook is testing a new feature that aims to keep users inside its platform when they’re looking for factual information they would otherwise turn to Google or Wikipedia to find. The company confirmed to TechCrunch it’s now piloting an updated version of Facebook Search that displays factual information when users search for topics like public figures, places, and interests — like movies and TV shows.
For example, if you type in a movie title in the Facebook search bar, you’ll be shown an information box that gives you all the details about the movie.
The information is gathered from publicly available data, including Wikipedia. But instead of requiring users to click out of Facebook to view the information, it’s displayed in a side panel next to the search results. This is similar to the automatically generated Knowledge Panel format Google uses for these same types of searches.From: https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/facebook-adds-wikipedia-knowledge-boxes-in-search-results/579510/
Granted, Facebook's knowledge graph isn't close to competing with Google's. the social network already tried building a knowledge graph years ago, which would allow the company to mix audience based data from the Open Graph with other types of entities. It ultimately failed.
The attempt at building a knowledge graph now comes with problems:
"For starters, it doesn’t always recognize a search term as a proper title. A search for “joker,” for instance displayed a Wikipedia-powered information box for the movie. But a search for “parasite” failed to do so for the Oscar-winning title that became the first non-English film to win Best Picture in 2020.
Meanwhile, a search for “Donald Trump” easily returned an information panel for the U.S. president, but information for many members of his cabinet did not come up when they were also searched by name. Information about leading coronavirus expert Dr. Anthony Fauci came up in a side panel when the term “anthony fauci” was entered in the Facebook’s search box, but not when “dr. fauci” was used as the search query."
Messenger
Facebook provides ad slots in its Messenger app, which recently merged with Instagram and Whatsapp to allow cross-messaging (source).
How should you navigate this trend?
Mixing paid and organic results is one of the characteristics of Platform Confluence. Online platforms scale ads and organic results separately to a point, but then either find other revenue streams or become more aggressive with ads.
Amazon started without 3rd party sellers altogether, Google is continuously increasing the number of ads in search results, and Facebook is looking for more channels to run ads on, e.g. Messenger.
As marketers, we need to face reality and use ads in combination with organic results to maximize reach (if our budget allows it and the ROI is greater than the cost). We need to accept that organic results compete more with paid ones over time, but also look at our data to understand the impact because the trend doesn't affect every vertical the same way.
Direct and brand traffic become even more important to decouple from platform dependency. I see link building, podcast ads, and strong positioning as vital.
Lastly, pushing users to environments you can control like email, web apps, or native apps, keeps its position as top retention channel that provokes companies' antifragility.