NewsLine Column: The Future Of Online Marketing
The online advertising industry is expected to grow by more than 50% this year as more and more marketers realise its value on the media schedule. With this in mind, Martin Child, managing director of search targeted marketing firm Overture, looks at how the online marketing model will evolve over the coming months…
It’s no secret that the easiest place to measure any kind of marketing campaign is online. The internet allows us to track customers’ behaviour and preferences and market to them accordingly. So how can companies make best use of the internet – and search in particular – to market themselves? More importantly in such a fast-moving environment, how will the online marketing model evolve over the coming months?
Search engines offer a variety of ways for advertisers to appear in search results pages. There are three different entry points that marketers can choose, including algorithmic, paid inclusion and paid placement.
Algorithmic Many search engines use crawling technology to scour the web and create an index of pages that can be searched by internet users. Algorithmic search engines use keyword matching and link popularity to reach listings. With search engine databases containing billions of catalogued web pages, it’s difficult to position a website so it stands out amongst the masses. Search Engine Marketers (SEMs) can help ensure a website is easy to find, use and understand from the crawler’s perspective. If you’re considering an SEM, it may be wise to check references first – Overture has an Accreditation Programme to help UK businesses recognise which SEMs have pledged to follow Best Practice guidelines.Paid Inclusion Advertisers seeking to expedite the rate at which they are included in a search engine’s database can pay a fee to be reviewed more frequently and comprehensively. This is a strategy that might make sense for a company that’s recently changed its site design, for example and wants to be sure any content changes are addressed rapidly. However, paying a fee offers no guarantee that listings will always be included in the search results, or where they might be ranked on a given page.Paid Placement Paid placement search allows marketers to reach people precisely at the moment they are actively looking for a product or service – and only pay for results. A company marketing products online is able to bid on search terms relevant to its business, for example ‘flights to Paris’ for a travel agent. When a consumer searches for those terms on one of Overture’s partner websites (MSN, Freeserve, Lycos, Tiscali, etc), the company’s listings are displayed, ranked by the amount they have bid for that particular term, the highest first. The marketer then only pays the bid price once a prospect actually clicks through to their site.
The commercial search industry is currently seeing a number of additional tools and initiatives to enhance the use of paid placement search. From exact, phrase and broad matching, to search term suggestion tools and methods to track the best-performing listings, advertisers are now in a better position than ever before to optimise their search marketing campaigns.
Taking search marketing one step further, localised advertising is likely to be a natural evolution for this marketplace. For example, most search engines can already detect where a Web visitor is located – if he is in the UK, he will receive different results than if he were in the US. Overture is currently testing a local search service, so that people can receive sponsored and general search results for businesses located in their area.
And the years to come? The most recent IPA Bellwether report confirms that companies are shifting budget towards Internet spend because of the cost efficiency and accountability of marketing through the Internet. Two thirds of companies and agencies in the UK currently use online marketing and one in six believe online will be the most accurate marketing tool in the next five years – it would seem that commercial search has a bright future.
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