This morning I heard something that took me by surprise at Google’s “Survival of the Fastest” event in London.
The introductory session was delivered by Arjan Dijk - EMEA Marketing Director, Google.
During his presentation he was talking about how to best to use Google Adsense and he used the example of how Neutrogena used AdSense, in his opinion, very successfully.
Neutrogena provides a range of skin care products and one of them is sun block.

In order to get good traffic and branding from search engines, Arjan told us how they were bidding on the term “Golf” in Google California. According to him, this was a very clever move as this enabled Neutrogena to get exposure to those interested in golf and, according to him, golfers definitely need sun protection while playing the game in the California sun.

What amazed me were two things:

Firstly, is one of relevance: In my simple mind, sun tan protection is about as far away, in terms of search engine relevancy, to the phrase “golf” as loft extensions or adult toys. Furthermore, the title and description used by Neutrogena in the AdSense creative did not even try to make an association (sorry I did not get to write it down when I saw it). According to Arjan, the resultant landing page was not a golf related page on the Neutrogena site.

This did not make sense to me – nothing was relevant. If they had provided a creative such as “Neutrogena offers great sun protection while playing golf” and then send traffic to a landing page that spoke about Neutrogena’s range of sun protection for Golfers, fair enough. However, according to the example trumpeted by Google at this event, it seemed to be a case of a blatant attempt to hijack traffic against all of Google’s relevancy and quality score rules & suggestions.

The second thing that I found very interesting was that Arjan, a director at Google, actually chose to use this example when talking about how to get the most out of AdSense, in this case to a room of people who were by and large not very search marketing savvy.

Why?

Is he trying to tell us that Google does not really care about how relevant their results are (as long as they can earn from it?). If the Neutrogena example is worth talking about by a director of Google then maybe he is hinting that, in future, Google is ok (and possibly happy?) to have loft conversions and adult toys appear in the paid results for the phrase “golf” (the same argument could be applied stating that golfers live in homes, therefore need loft conversions and, being men, they would surely be interested in anything adult too). When I asked him about this after his presentation he told me that because they had a good CTR, their quality score was possibly not affected, even though the relevancy was very questionable at best. Really? Is Google then moving away from quality score as we currently know it - as long as they can earn from the resultant clicks.

Surely not. I must say, I left the event feeling very worried.