Google announced initial availability of a new advertising program called Boost today, beginning in San Francisco, Houston and Chicago. Boost automatically determines what keywords your business ought to bid on and recommends a range of monthly advertising budgets based on the competitiveness of your business sector. It then runs Cost Per Click ads in Google search and Maps for the recommended keywords.
The service was announced today on the Google Lat/Long Blog, in a post written by Project Manager Kiley McEvoy. McEvoy joined Google three years ago after getting a Masters in Information Engineering, Theoretical Cognitive Neuroscience & Engineering at Dartmouth.
Boost appears aimed at turning Google advertising for local businesses from a complex art often hired-out to specialist consultants into a turn-key technology with far less friction than non-technical business owners experience today.
The use of artificial intelligence to determine keyword and bid recommendations is a very logical extension Google's core competency and likely to fit within the brand expectations of small business owners.
As a program of Google Places, Boost could offer substantial monetization that would enable Places to experiment with other innovative location-based technologies outside of advertising. Consulting analyst firm PSFK has identified what it calls Pre-View, real-time data and video served up from local shops, as a key part of the future of retail, for example. Experiments or acquisitions in that field could be made all the more feasible by a fat pipeline of revenue produced by local advertising made easier through automation.
Two weeks ago, Marissa Mayer, vice president of search product and user experience at Google, announced she was changing jobs to focus on local search and location technologies.
A major new monetization technology, combined with a transfer of substantial leadership, could position Google to extend its early major lead in local and location - a tech sector expected to explode in importance with the rise of mobile and other connected devices.