One of the most exasperating challenges in Google’s paid search marketing platform is the smartphone “search by voice” dilemma. But before I tell you why, perhaps I should explain why it is a dilemma.
First of all, voice search technology does not provide spell check for what it “hears” (or thinks it hears) when a person speaks into their device. So it critically misspells (or mis-hears) many search terms issued by voice command. Since we generally type correctly spelled keywords, we have to ask a simple question. Does Google A.I. really translate misspelled search terms into correctly spelled keywords, as in desktop search? It may not. If Google A.I. misinterprets a spoken word, it may not match that search term up to a correctly spelled keyword at all.
This is a voice recognition problem. And it can be as complex as the multitude of phone types, software versions, O.S. and microphone capabilities (multiplied by each other). It’s still a good topic to drill down on with a Google Account Manager, if not for the fact that there’s a much more egregious problem with voice search which far overshadows the complex technical limits of voice recognition.
And I would argue that it’s a very simple problem to fix.
That’s because Google already recognizes the number of words in a search command. It has to, if it has a built-in rule that limits negative keywords by character count. In the attached screen capture, we can see that Google Ads places this limit on search terms that are more than 80 characters in length.
What we find in the vast majority of searches that exceed 80 characters is that (1) they are more often than not probably voice searches, and (2) they tend to have troubling characteristics in the way of problematic spellings and random thought patterns.
At the risk of stereotyping a searcher “persona” that is relatively new (the smartphone voice searcher) we do see a pattern. Over 92% of searches that are more than 80 characters long do not convert. Why is this? Again, it is the characteristic of this search persona and how it so markedly differs from the original desktop persona (a persona which predates the smartphone persona by nearly a decade).
The desktop searcher has evolved over the two decades of the 1990’s to 2010. They have conducted many billions of searches, perhaps trillions in those 20 years. They have learned how to search successfully, with minimal typing (since spelling does matter, moreso in the past than in today’s auto-correct environment, but .. good habits are hard to break). They have a large screen of search returns (URL choices) to pick from – a full page – as their search progresses. We have observed this search persona over almost that entire 20 years – and their behavior is predictable.
The voice searcher is comparatively more rambling and erratic. It’s much too easy to speak into a phone than to type, and words come flowing in multiple successive searches. These searchers identify with their phone as a personal assistant and they ask it numerous questions in this new expectation. They can ramble incoherently from locations and situations much more erratic than in an office, from a familiar chair. As their searches exceed 80 characters the misinterpretations of their queries become construed to actually relate to our keywords, and they click away haphazardly at website links that have nothing to do with what they are searching for, and they repeat the process over and over.
This description of the persona may seem a bit colorful, but hopefully you get the idea. This persona burns up our client click cost and NEVER converts. Suffice it to say, from where we sit, we seriously want any search term over 80 characters to be automatically considered a negative search term so that our ad is not shown.
But Google cannot (or will not) do that. The system can count characters and NOT ALLOW you to add a search term that is more than 80 characters long, but it cannot simply disqualify an 80 plus character search term as a negative keyword.
Or so it would seem. Of course Google probably could create or enable such a rule. But they would be admitting that smartphones are hurting business advertising due to the unpredictable behavior of the smartphone voice search persona. Covid 19 has left us with a huge number of unemployed service workers in the U.S. They have time on their hands and these are strange times. So culturally, we should expect an impact on search behavior. Many advertisers will simply have to adjust their device settings to down-bid mobile search altogether – and to restrict keywords more than before – even though that locks out a growing segment of search.
We’ve had this discussion with Google several times now. Time will tell, as the impact of change makes its way through various artificial and organic systems.