At times there are small little things that Google does that you hardly even notice as a marketer. You almost always swear by the upgrades, downgrades and development that it offers to you as an advertising platform because come on, who are you kidding? It’s Google. How can they possibly ever go wrong? You almost never blame Google.

What I am going to talk about here is one small, tiny tweak that you might have noticed recently and also ignored but you have no idea how it’s going to impact and how it’s a masterstroke from Google.

It takes a lot to build a brand. At times it takes crores of marketing budget, ensuring consistency in your messaging, creating engaging content online and offline, constant effort that goes in visuals, logo, tone and a lot of other things in which a consumer might build a connection with you and start recalling you with something that you are very strongly related to.

However, let’s assume you did all the above mentioned things, but now you have to fight another battle. The battle between asking people coming directly to you rather than coming through Google. Let’s take the case of an average non-heavy internet user. This user likes things simple, quick and fast.

What on the internet is the most simple, quick and fast? Google. Obviously.

Get to the point. What did Google do?

Let’s take an example of the biggest online Indian brand right now. Flipkart.com. It took 7 long hard working years for Flipkart to become a household name and it is still struggling.  Also, let me tell you that for an online brand to know how popular it is or how it’s recall and awareness is, it depends a lot on the % of direct traffic of the total traffic that it gets and also the “organic branded search” which is how often are people searching for it on Google.

According to similarweb.com, approximately 31% of Flipkart’s traffic in the last 3 months came from Search.

Yes, people actually entered www.flipkart.com in the google search bar

In the above picture if you look closely at the top 3 keywords on organic as well as paid keywords you will know it’s Flipkart. If you also look at the major search engines it gets those 31% traffic from you will know it’s obviously Google. Now any logical marketer would say “If I am already present organically on Google’s first page on my brand name, why the hell should I advertise on my brand keyword and pay money for it”

Google said, fair enough. If you don’t advertise on your own brand name for perfectly valid reason i’ll figure out a way to earn out of the brand that you have made so popular that people are searching for it. And this is what happened.

When you enter “Flipkart” in Google search bar, you see below

Are you watching closely?

Earlier, the highlighted search bar never used to search on results. But now Google has integrated that and it’s even prompting you to search to get results from flipkart. Notice what you are doing, instead of directly clicking on the link or going to the website you are prompted to search directly from Google on the website.

Let’s search for “nexus 5 price” inside the ‘Results from flipkart.com’

Searching for “nexus 5 price in india”

This is what happens when I click enter.

Hey, nexus 5 for 24k let me click and see

Although I am shown organic results from Flipkart anout nexus phones at the same time I am also being shown ads for nexus 5 by other brands which is not what I necessarily came looking for. Remember, I searched for Flipkart.

For a site that has approximately 100 million visitors every month  and 31% of those visitors come from Google and a further major chunk of them search “Flipkart” this becomes fairly decent opportunity for Google to leverage on. It’s not particularly helping users that much apart from luring them into clicking ads they never really intended to search on Google in the first place.

Brands might start search advertising on their own brand keywords to avoid the chance of users using Google’s secondary brand powered search bar. But as a marketer, it’s a small but smart tweak by Google to increase search habit of internet users in India.

Google always makes things exciting to be in the online marketing space specially when it kind of rules it.

P.S: The idea for the above post was given to me by my manager and mentor, Soumendu Ganguly