by Alan Brody
To paraphrase Lou Reed, a marketing budget may not buy you customers but it does buy you a good search engine to go out and find them. Increasingly, marketers of all stripes, particularly those in major corporations, are going for the ride. After nearly a decade of banners, spam campaigns and commercial search engines, the marketing winner appears to be the paid search. This is the secondary listing that pops up, typically to the right of the free search result, that can be bought on an ongoing basis in an automated auction system.
This pay per click model means you only pay for your leads but it also means you get free text branding as long as your listing sits there waiting to be clicked. In this time of heightened sensitivity over spamming it has moved from the wings, where it was once considered a kind of stealth marketing vehicle, to the center stage as the place to reach new prospects and send a reminder to old customers. It is also a totally voluntary form of advertising and therefore politically quite correct.
But what can be achieved with it? Apparently it has become THE way to bring in new prospects. DMNews Senior Editor, Brian Morrissey pegs this as a $2.3 billion business that is increasingly attracting the gaze of Microsoft, which is beefing up MSN to compete with search leader, Google. While eMail still tops the Internet in usage, search, said, Google head of advertising, Patrick Keane is at 2nd place. "81 % of users are doing search, an average of 35 searches per month by 110 million people."
With that kind of traffic, it is essential for websites to be in this game and it has spawned two kinds of search-related cottage industries. One kind is all about optimization, helping companies develop strategies to get to the top of the search pile. Officially, this is an industry that search engine companies do not support and they like to say there is no need for them. But the search companies regularly change their algorithms as Google did last month, which can upset the ranking of sites, immediately creating full employment for this "unnecessary" industry.
Last month, Google changed their strategy by favoring for contextual information over keywords forcing many sites to be rewritten to in hopes of regaining their rankings. With pay per click, the one legitimate place to buy and sell influence on the search engines sites, the situation is quite different. Companies are supposed to buy their way in but figuring out how to play the game optimally is another story. At its simples, however, you can pick a number of keywords and write a 3 line text ad and then place a maximum bid for a potential click which gets you a placement. Depending on the competition at that moment you will get placed higher or lower on the page. But you only actually pay if someone clicks on your ad. Many of the questioners found this type of dynamic marketing model too complex to handle. Unpredictability, was a recurring refrain from the audience. But the fact is that participants can set a budget and while the cost per click is variable the overall cost remains constant. You can experiment with rankings, keywords and so on in order to optimize your return on investment.
"Google rewards creativity by ranking relevance," said Kevin Lee, whose company Did-it.com helps companies navigate and manage the pay per click universe. "Other systems like (Yahoo's) Overture are a strict auction system, so whoever pays more gets the better placement.While each pay-per-click system is relatively simple, they are different enough to invite comparisons between each marketplace and through varying the strategies within each search engine. Then managing all these efforts is complex thus translating into employment for the Search Engine aftermarket of consultants.
In all, the Search Engine iBreakfast showed that the pay-per-click market is growing, is still little understood among business and likely to grow as the vehicle of choice for marketers in search of customers.