> if Williams Sonoma was not advertising on that search term, Lodge and Food52 etc etc would
If I as a customer am using such specific search terms, then I would assume that my intention is to find and possibly buy this specific product. The results of other brands might be annoying, but why should I click on them? The relevant results are still displayed on the first page.
For example if the customer was previously not familiar with Williams Sonoma but had seen an ad in the paper or on TV or on the subway etc, that caused them to search for Williams Sonoma cast iron skillet.
And beside that a lot of people routinely misclick or click on ads not understanding that they are ads even when they are marked as such.
So much this on phones. I think I missclicked adds like 10 times in a year, before realizing there where adblockers on Firefox mobile. Zero legitimate clicks. Never happens me on desktop, unless there is a screen jump scam.
So the theory is that if I search for "Williams Sonoma cast iron skillet", but misclick on some competitor, I'm buying that instead? I don't know, I don't usually assume the rest of humanity to be a lot dumber than me.
People don’t need to be dumb to do that. Being inexperienced with computers or confused about computers is enough to cause people to do a lot of things like that. There are a lot of people out there who are inexperienced with or confused by computers.
But my main point was that the brand may not be all that important in the first place even though it was included as part of the search term. The person making the search could’ve seen an ad and been intrigued by the product, but upon landing on a competitor site they may choose to buy a similar product from them instead.
If you are deeply into the kind of thing you are buying, you will make a lot of research to find the best one. But there are a lot of things we buy that we don’t care as deeply about, and where we may choose the first one that fits the bill sufficiently well.
The competing ads will often say something like "Introducing [Product Y] which costs 25% less and is 10% less smellier than [Product X you searched for]"
If you've never heard of Product Y, you might be intrigued and click. Maybe you want something less smelly!
Ultimately I think it decreases google's value as a search engine (to the user searching) by a very small amount, but nets them a high immediate return. I bet it's hard to quantify the net effect over time, and it would be a really hard sell internally to not allow it.
I've noticed the quality of google search decrease drastically over the last 15+ years or so. I don't think that's directly tied to ad buys though.
I have searched for "Digikey something" and wound up with clicking on a "Mouser ad".
At this point, Google's first page is so bad that I can almost build an anti search engine. Search for a term, and then exclude all the sites on the first page from ever showing up permanently ever again.
runnaroo showed things could be done better. The problem is that doing better doesn't seem to convert to profit.
Your logic about the ads is sound, but your experience as a customer does not mean all customers exhibit this behavior. The best course of action is to test this conclusion which can be reliably done with a Google Ads Experiment.
I think there is an under-appreciated average search engine user in the comment:
People will typically write their intent on the search engine even when they could simply directly to the website.
Case in point: The top 10 bing searches are for websites, including FB, Google, Youtube [1]. This traffic is highly competitive and should (as in all competitive markets) be bid among competitors.
The address bar is the search bar. My wife never types "facebook.com". She types "facebook", gets the google search page, and then clicks on facebook from there. It pisses me off that if I start typing facebook, Chrome doesn't autocomplete to facebook.com. In contrast, if I'm in Safari, and type "n" I get "news.ycombinator.com" autocompleted.
Small business people in my area of UK have always done this, type in the box in the middle (usually Google, occasionally Bing or some other service). But my pretty tech-literate kids do it too, even when I show them how they 'should' do it and that is faster, and they don't need the extra click to get where they're going ... mad!
On Chrome on Win10 as I use at work though, typing in the address bar, with my settings, I get auto-fill of addresses (the history search is noticeably missing vs Firefox) including the option to use 'tab to search' on a domain.
If I as a customer am using such specific search terms, then I would assume that my intention is to find and possibly buy this specific product. The results of other brands might be annoying, but why should I click on them? The relevant results are still displayed on the first page.