I have to confess from the outset that I'm new to this industry, my background being very much as an offline marketer, so apologies if anyone's come across this already!

I was googling some fairly generic PPC terms - 'PPC Management'; 'PPC Agencies'; and so on. I then remembered that I needed to write a document for our sales team, and so I googled 'managing the sales process'. I was surprised when the SERPs page that was returned had the appropriate organic results, but that all the sponsored links on the page were for PPC agencies - a result of my previous searches, I guess.

Google results for search – previously I had been searching PPC terms…

Normal google results for search (new window)…

Anyway, thinking that this was just some kind of weird coincidence, I decided to see if I could replicate this. Unfortunately, this proved surprisingly easy.

I googled 'Japanese Imports'; 'Japanese Import Car Insurance'; then 'Japanese Imported Food'; and yet again, with the final search, the sponsored results were for car insurance providers. Now if you just Google 'Japanese Imported Food' you get a totally different set of sponsored results, which are indeed related to food rather than car insurance.

Now, I can totally see what Google is trying to do. On the basis that many people type in several search terms before they find what they're looking for, they are making assumptions on what a user is looking for based on their recent search terms. This is fine in principle, but you can see from the examples above that, if anything, it is feeding the user irrelevant results - precisely the opposite of their intention, I'm sure, but nevertheless that is the result.

Perhaps more worryingly is the effect that this might have on those advertisers who are appearing in the sponsored results:

Not only are they appearing for terms which are not appropriate for them, but I would guess that this could affect their quality scores (as I'm guessing that they won't get many clickthroughs), thereby making it more costly for them to appear against the terms for which they actually WANT to appear.

I'd be really interested to hear your thoughts on this!