Mon Slater, Head of Natural Media

I caveat this with stating SO FAR, but the results we have seen have been well, meh.

To recap, a few weeks ago SEO’s, including myself were up in arms about Google’s search team making the announcement that they were protecting the personalised search results by not providing organic search keyword data to anyone who was logged in to a Google Account.

Google said; “As search becomes an increasingly customized experience, we recognize the growing importance of protecting the personalized search results we deliver. As a result, we’re enhancing our default search experience for signed-in users….What does this mean for sites that receive clicks from Google search results? When you search from https://www.google.com, websites you visit from our organic search listings will still know that you came from Google, but won’t receive information about each individual query.”

“To help you better identify the signed in user organic search visits, we created the token “(not provided)” within Organic Search Traffic Keyword reporting. You will continue to see referrals without any change; only the queries for signed in user visits will be affected. Note that “cpc” paid search data is not affected.”

But after a few weeks what does it mean? We have seen little impact on all of our clients traffic with under 1% of keywords delivered to the site through organic search as “not provided” in analytics. Click on the image below to see a larger chart.

Less than 1% of traffic has been affected

This may change over time, and may well be different for varying sectors. The more people in the industry that share the data, the more we will know.

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Saiful Ahmed, media manager , agenda 21- blog

Demand Side Platforms (DSP) are currently very much in “favour” and especially with large agency networks who are investing heavily.  Many of their clients are being persuaded that agencies can play both gamekeeper and poacher but do advertisers really benefit ?  Our view is that the agency networks are desperate not to miss out like they did with search and are over selling the benefits of DSP’s to clients.

DSP’s are still experiencing the same problems as the ad networks were having 12-18 months ago – tracking, control and transparency. Although really the key benefits of deploying the services of a DSP’s  is to drive traffic to the advertiser’s site, at which point re-targeting is then used to convert potential customers. However, the problem is that this model isn’t scalable or sustainable and prospecting for new customers is essential, therefore all other digital media strategies and outlets are required.   Also without putting in place an attribution model, advertisers could be placing too much value on re-targeting much the same way as happens with paid search.

Any future problems that we envisage with the DSP’s are to do with government ruling on cookie-based data, although as an industry adopting the ‘informed consent’ approach gives the user the option to opt-out (as long as they are made fully aware they are being re-targeted from cookie-data). Conversely, we should remember that users can always opted back in if they feel certain cookie based information, like remembering your last purchase or login details’ is a handy function to have in this time poor society.

Another question advertisers should also be asking is how many DSP’s are they using ? There may be only one specifically on the media plan but ad networks use them, Google content network uses them etc etc  We recommend avoid using the services of more than one DSP as you’re competing in the same ad exchange marketplace and will probably end up competing against yourself and inflating the rates.

So agencies and media owners need to be more transparent about the advantages and disadvantages about DSP’s.  They clearly have an important role to play moving forward but they are only part of the much wider digital ecosystem.

Join our conversation on Linked-in to discuss it further; we want to hear from you.

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