Why Google Book Search *Is* An Effective Advertising Medium
Last week I did a post entitled Why Google Print Will Be An Ineffective Advertising Medium.
Today let me trot out some numbers that make the opposite case. 
On Thursday Google announced that it was changing the name of the program from Google Print to Google Book Search. At the same time in a letter to participating publishers they announced that they would be promoting Google Book Search on the Google home page. What that means, apparently, is this little link at the bottom of the answer set page:
Pretty subtle — but it had a dramatic effect on my Google Book Search ad revenue.
Impressions doubled, and so did click-through rate — which means that the new impressions were far more efficient at generating click-throughs. That makes sense, because I suspect that until now Google Print was getting a lot of casual users with no particular objective. With the little “try searching” link at the bottom of the page, Google Book Search is getting users who have a goal, so they are clicking through more often.
If other publishers are seeing the same trend, Google has at least doubled its revenue from Google Book Search, by adding one little line to the bottom of their search page. Let’s hope they make it permanent.
What’s going on here? I think Google is getting serious about giving publishers a carrot. I suspect that they are also decreasing their “take” from the buy/sell arbitrage for ads to sweeten the pot for publishers in the short term. After all, they can always increase it again once the service is accepted …
There are some other important implications for publishers, but I’ll save those for another post. Stay tuned!
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