The Paid Search World Grows Larger.  More Complicated?

Chris Boggs
InstantPosition.com

Microsoft will announce in early August the release of its own paid search (PPC) service to a limited audience of search engine marketers.  MSN had been using Yahoo! to provide paid listings, even after the recent introduction of its new crawler-indexed “organic” rankings. 

But now, as detailed by Danny Sullivan in the SEW blog, they should be selling ads directly to advertisers by March 2006.  This comes nipping at the heels of the official announcement of Ask Jeeves new sponsored listings.  Ask Jeeves is maintaining Google as a backup, however (Search Day).  And sandwiched in between: Yahoo! is starting a new program announced in its official blog that will provide its contextual listings to a variety of new small to midsize publishers.  (See ads to the right within a few weeks…haha)  These will look similar to the Google AdSense boxes many Internet surfers are becoming familiar with.

With all these significant moves, and the constant rise in the importance of visibility within local portals such as Verizon SuperPages, managing Internet advertising is growing exponentially more complicated.  In the past, some advertising agencies and fewer large corporations could staff one or two trained specialists in order to avoid outsourcing PPC management to a search engine marketing firm.  As the choices grow, however, this becomes an ever more consuming task. It also becomes an even more important undertaking, as consumers become accustomed to clicking on these ads to find exactly what the description implied.     

Advertising itself has many mediums, and advertising agencies have always been able to keep up with the growing population of cable and satellite television channels, print Medias, and radio stations formats.  They have learned through surveys to study the multitude of profiles of people that watch shows or listen to talk radio.  Search advertising has already grown at a pace that makes the world’s television station population seem as large as what you can pick up at home with a small antenna.  And people are shopping -- why else would the marketer continue to advertise?  Internet shoppers also seem to be willing to fill out marketing surveys when nicely asked.

The classic “fear factor” in PPC marketing is “click fraud.”  Without going too far into this, it is safe to say that web analytics companies are increasing the capabilities of advertisers to track and receive compensation for fraudulent activity.  If you are a large advertiser that is not using third party tracking software, I would say that can almost be compared to not having independent accounting audits.  Smaller advertisers can benefit from this type of software as well.  Hopefully, the analytics companies will be able to keep up with growing number of channels required to track.

This article could go on forever describing all of the increased tasks associated with each new advertising channel or portal available.  The possibilities for increased verticals and more accepted (read here: less fraudulent) “second tier” PPC’s.  The bottom line is it used to be that you could just run an Overture (now Yahoo!) and a Google campaign and produce serious results.  Although this is still the case, getting closer to true market saturation will only happen by using at least those portals mentioned so far in this article.  The list of additional channels already available would stretch out for three more pages.  The more prepared an SEM department or outsourced firm is, the better it will be able to handle your entire search marketing needs, including continually important, complex and competitive organic optimization.