Top of The Funnel
Google sits at the top of the funnel & all other parts of the value chain are compliments to be commoditized.
Buy premium domain names?
Google’s SERPs test replacing the words associated with the domain name gray.
Improve conversion rates? Your competitor almost certainly did as well, now you both can bid more & hand over an increasing economic rent to Google.
Invest in brand awareness? Google shows ads for competitors on your brand terms, forcing you to buy to protect the brand equity you paid to build.
Search Metrics mentioned
Hotels.com was one of the biggest losers during the recent algorithm updates: “I’m going to keep on this same theme there, and I’m not going to say overall numbers, the biggest loser, but for my loser I’m going to pick Hotels.com, because they were literally like neck and neck, like one and two with Booking, as far as how close together they were, and the last four weeks, they’ve really increased that separation.”
As Google ate the travel category
The value of hotel-related domain names has fallen through the floor.
Most of the top selling hotel-related domain Life Insurance Telemarketing Leads names were sold about a decade ago:
On August 8th HongKongHotels.com sold for $4,038. A decade ago that name likely would have sold for around $100,000.
And the new buyer may have overpaid for it!
Growing Faster Than the Market
Google consistently grows their ad revenues 20% a year in a global economy growing at under 4%.
There are only about 6 ways they can do that
growth of web usage (though many of those who are getting online today have a far lower disposable income than those who got on a decade or two ago did)
gain marketshare (very hard in search, given that they effectively are the market in most markets outside of a few countries like China & Russia)
create new inventory (new ad types on image search results, Google Maps & YouTube)
charge more for clicks
improve at targeting through better surveillance of web Wikipedia the is hard to read users (getting harder after GDPR & similar efforts from some states in the next year or two)
shift click
Streams away from organic toward
Paid channels (through larger ads, more interactive ad units, less appealing organic result formatting, pushing organic results below the fold, hiding organic results, etc.)
Six of One, Half-dozen of the Other
Wednesday both Expedia and TripAdvisor reported earnings after hours & both fell off a cliff: “Both Okerstrom and Kaufer complained that their organic, or free, links are ending up further down the page in Google search results as Google prioritizes its own travel businesses.”
Losing 20% to 25% of your market cap in a single day is an extreme move for a company worth billions of dollars.
Thursday Google hit fresh all time highs
“Google’s old motto was ‘Don’t Be Evil’, but you can’t be this big and profitable and not be evil. Evil and all-time highs pretty much go hand in hand.” – Howard Lindzon
Booking held up much better than
TripAdvisor & Expedia as they have a bigger footprint in Europe (where antitrust is a thing) and they have a higher reliance on paid search versus organic.
