And beside that a lot of people routinely misclick or click on ads not understanding that they are ads even when they are marked as such.
So much this on phones. I think I missclicked adds like 10 times in a year, before realizing there where adblockers on Firefox mobile. Zero legitimate clicks. Never happens me on desktop, unless there is a screen jump scam.
But my main point was that the brand may not be all that important in the first place even though it was included as part of the search term. The person making the search could’ve seen an ad and been intrigued by the product, but upon landing on a competitor site they may choose to buy a similar product from them instead.
If you are deeply into the kind of thing you are buying, you will make a lot of research to find the best one. But there are a lot of things we buy that we don’t care as deeply about, and where we may choose the first one that fits the bill sufficiently well.
Doesn't that just make for effective advertising? I'm failing to see the harm here.
If you've never heard of Product Y, you might be intrigued and click. Maybe you want something less smelly!
I've noticed the quality of google search decrease drastically over the last 15+ years or so. I don't think that's directly tied to ad buys though.
At this point, Google's first page is so bad that I can almost build an anti search engine. Search for a term, and then exclude all the sites on the first page from ever showing up permanently ever again.
runnaroo showed things could be done better. The problem is that doing better doesn't seem to convert to profit.
People will typically write their intent on the search engine even when they could simply directly to the website.
Case in point: The top 10 bing searches are for websites, including FB, Google, Youtube [1]. This traffic is highly competitive and should (as in all competitive markets) be bid among competitors.
Small business people in my area of UK have always done this, type in the box in the middle (usually Google, occasionally Bing or some other service). But my pretty tech-literate kids do it too, even when I show them how they 'should' do it and that is faster, and they don't need the extra click to get where they're going ... mad!
On Chrome on Win10 as I use at work though, typing in the address bar, with my settings, I get auto-fill of addresses (the history search is noticeably missing vs Firefox) including the option to use 'tab to search' on a domain.
If I as a customer am using such specific search terms, then I would assume that my intention is to find and possibly buy this specific product. The results of other brands might be annoying, but why should I click on them? The relevant results are still displayed on the first page.