Google's New Mortgage Service Sign of Google's Next Strategy
It used to be enough for Google to make the market place by allowing buyers and sellers to find each other. With the announcement of Google's new mortgage aggregator service, they are expanding to take more direct control of certain market verticals. It would be logical for Google to expand into other vertical lead generation services on a pay per lead basis, as we may see in the coming months. This could lead to quite an expansion of Google's ad revenue.
In the trackless waste of the early internet, it was inevitable that some one would create search engines or directories to bring order out of chaos. Search engines, most basically, allow seekers to find the information or the products you want among the many confusing offerings on the web. With the power to direct huge numbers of seekers to web sites, the logical next step was to charge money for all those viewers. Now that there's too much information, in the form of spam, you can even pay to filter out the parts of the information you don't want.
Google's new mortgage aggregation service, is part of the Google Merchant Search, which was recently beta tested on the google.co.uk search market. http://www.google.co.uk/help/merchantsearchbeta/faq.html The service allows users to browse mortgage rates and then leave contact information to request a mortgage quote.
Of course, this is essentially the same business model that Lending Tree follows. A law suit has resulted as reported in Is Google Entering the Mortgage Quote Business?. So, Google is beta-testing a new lead generation business. The downside is that Google is competing with a mortgage business that may draw a good bit of revenue from the search traffic provided by Google and other search engines.
It is obvious that any business, like Lending Tree, that draws leads and revenue from online search will be at quite a disadvantage competing against Google for organic search traffic. Google's paid search and organic search resources would allow it to draw a dominant share of the search traffic and lead revenue, to the detriment of Lending Tree or any lead generation business web site.
Google's statement on the new service depicts it as a limited test: “We’re constantly looking for new ways to help people find what they are looking for on the Internet. As part of that effort, we are currently working on a small ad unit test that will run against a limited number of mortgage-related search queries in the U.S.”
This competition could force Lending Tree to buy even more Google ads to compete with Google, or to increase spending on other forms of offline advertising to drive more lead traffic. The end result is greater cost for Lending Tree.
The next step would be for Google to compete with aggregator web sites in other vertical markets. Google would move from market maker to actually competing with their own online advertisers. In a tight economy, Google sees an opportunity to increase revenue at the expense of their advertisers using the aggregator business model.
Google's entry into any of these market niches will require close scrutiny, to foresee the end result, and to create suitable counter strategies. Search engine observers have been following Google's encroachment into their advertisers' markets since May of 2008. -Read Full Article-
In the trackless waste of the early internet, it was inevitable that some one would create search engines or directories to bring order out of chaos. Search engines, most basically, allow seekers to find the information or the products you want among the many confusing offerings on the web. With the power to direct huge numbers of seekers to web sites, the logical next step was to charge money for all those viewers. Now that there's too much information, in the form of spam, you can even pay to filter out the parts of the information you don't want.
Google's new mortgage aggregation service, is part of the Google Merchant Search, which was recently beta tested on the google.co.uk search market. http://www.google.co.uk/help/merchantsearchbeta/faq.html The service allows users to browse mortgage rates and then leave contact information to request a mortgage quote.
Of course, this is essentially the same business model that Lending Tree follows. A law suit has resulted as reported in Is Google Entering the Mortgage Quote Business?. So, Google is beta-testing a new lead generation business. The downside is that Google is competing with a mortgage business that may draw a good bit of revenue from the search traffic provided by Google and other search engines.
It is obvious that any business, like Lending Tree, that draws leads and revenue from online search will be at quite a disadvantage competing against Google for organic search traffic. Google's paid search and organic search resources would allow it to draw a dominant share of the search traffic and lead revenue, to the detriment of Lending Tree or any lead generation business web site.
Google's statement on the new service depicts it as a limited test: “We’re constantly looking for new ways to help people find what they are looking for on the Internet. As part of that effort, we are currently working on a small ad unit test that will run against a limited number of mortgage-related search queries in the U.S.”
This competition could force Lending Tree to buy even more Google ads to compete with Google, or to increase spending on other forms of offline advertising to drive more lead traffic. The end result is greater cost for Lending Tree.
The next step would be for Google to compete with aggregator web sites in other vertical markets. Google would move from market maker to actually competing with their own online advertisers. In a tight economy, Google sees an opportunity to increase revenue at the expense of their advertisers using the aggregator business model.
Google's entry into any of these market niches will require close scrutiny, to foresee the end result, and to create suitable counter strategies. Search engine observers have been following Google's encroachment into their advertisers' markets since May of 2008. -Read Full Article-
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