Time
of the essence for online advertising
By Jim Hedger, StepForth News Editor, StepForth Placement Inc.
October 26 2005
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Online advertising is entering a fourth phase of innovation. Each of
the previous waves of online marketing innovation has directly influenced
or informed the development of successive waves. Starting with banner
ads ten years ago, the online economy has revolved around advertising.
While subscriber fees, government grants and private investment capital
paid for the development of the backbone, advertisers paid for the development
and sustentation of commercial websites. The same is true today but, just
over a decade into the evolution of the public/commercial Internet, advertising
has become much more precise, targeted and universally pervasive.
Advertising techniques are changing and a coordinated series of discussions
and experimentation surrounding emerging forms of online advertising known
as Web2.0 is taking place. To be more precise, the experimentation has been
going on for about two years at a much less coordinated technical level.
A virtual slew of online marketing gurus are catching on to a number of
new ideas and concepts and struggling to put them together into a coherent
marketing philosophy, hence the slew of hopeful hype surrounding Web2.0
last week.
There’s often a seriousness to hype that shouldn’t be dismissed
just because the messenger sounds like a huckster. When mass-marketing ideas
are exchanged by a lot of mass-marketers, (even far-fetched philosophical
ones), the stuff we do in marketing is subtly changed.
As we’ve seen in the past, some ideas will work well and some will
not. All hyperbole aside, a month worth of headlines in the search-media
clearly shows a rapid evolution in the world of online marketing is taking
place. It is happening for a number of reasons. Advertisers need to expand
on Internet marketing models, more players are entering the field, and technology
is allowing developers to do amazing new things.
While theoretical mountains are being moved around Madison Ave, the simple
and practical business of organic search engine optimization and placement
continues to operate under the radar of the mainstream business world. The
irony is, the one thing about each of the previous (and most of the newer)
online promotional trends that remains constant is a dependence on some
form of organic search.
Organic search is the backbone of all other search-based advertising formats.
Representing the fastest research and reference tool, various types of search
are the most used applications on the Internet after email. Several user
behaviour studies have confirmed that the majority of search engine users
click on the Top organic placements before looking at the paid placements
to the right and above. Organic search optimization also remains the least
expensive form of online marketing.
Google continues to understand the importance of its organic search listings
and if the conversations taking place over at Digital
Point and Search
Engine Watch are any indication, so do many webmasters making money through Google’s
AdSense program. It is a human tendency to neglect the simplest things and
a business tendency to promote things that make the most money. Often those
that tend to simple things are successful beyond those stuck in auras of
complexity. In our complex world however, those that learn to use the simplest
tools along with complex systems tend to do better than the rest.
An excellent example of this is the long-term StagedHomes.com online advertising
campaign we’ve worked with for two years. The campaign features a
real estate service developed and taught by our client. By targeting the
most frequently search keywords and phrases for her specific niche of the
massive US real estate industry, we have managed to achieve and maintain
a wide range of Top5 organic placements over the past two years. I’m
going to use this campaign as an example as I think the client is one of
the savviest long-term thinkers when it comes to making practical use of
new technologies to market and facilitate her business.
Being found on the search engine results pages wasn’t enough for
our client’s ambitions or the capacity of her business. Not only did
she want to grow quickly, the demand for her professional and teaching services
is immense and continues to grow. About eighteen months ago, she started
using AdWords and Overture (now Yahoo Search Marketing) to promote her business
and expand her reach by having her ads appear in online versions of publications
through content-distribution and AdSense subscribers.
Now, she has enjoyed the benefits of both worlds with amazing and persistent
organic placements and prominent AdWords and YSM placements under a wide
array of keywords and phrases. The organic placements continue to be the
most clicked from the search engine results pages themselves but she has
also gained a substantial number of clicks from ads appearing in online
trade magazines, real estate sites and blogs displaying ads generated by
Google or Yahoo.
She is always interested in expanding her markets and has done several
television and radio pieces along with producing her own series of videos,
products and educational services. It will be interesting to see what happens
when she begins to focus on the expanding array of online advertising options
from pod-casting commercials to targeting her messages through social networking
applications.
While the cost of advertising will likely be calculated based on the familiar
pay-per-click/call/action business model, the number of methods of expressing
her message is about to expand, rapidly.
In the coming months, search advertisers and webmasters will be able to
incorporate sound and video to keyword-specific landing pages. Pod-casting,
blogs and social networking trees will become means of delivering messages
and advertising. The search behaviours of members of social networks are
going to be been incorporated into algorithms of search results tailored
to meet the individual needs of each search-consumer. Some marketers even
speculate the rise of social networking and peer-recommendations will lead
to the diminishment of traditional search engines.
The rapidity of the evolution is being propelled by a number of extraordinary
events, the first and foremost of which is a sudden sense of urgency in
an environment increasingly dominated by Google. With Google assuming the
leadership role Microsoft held before 2000, every other online advertising
provider large and small has a universal competitor to examine, copy and
target.
Human life is reflected in human art. Today’s business drama is sort
of Shakespearian. In a world where there is one king who appears to dominate
above all others, there is only one main character for rivals to study,
emulate and undercut. When the king acts like a fink, as all corporate kings
tend to do from time to time, pretenders beget plotters who in turn tend
to stage an interesting second and third act. Yahoo, MSN, AOL and even LookSmart
have all made subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) Google-bashing a pillar
of their corporate PR strategies while working to copy and out-innovate
Google in the background.
Next, advancements in technology over the past two years are now being
accepted and used in the development and marketing communities. Ajax, a
tool developed in the late 90’s by Microsoft to run an online version
of Outlook, is now being used to operate server-side applications such as
Google Maps, and the subsequent explosion of using the Google Maps API to
customize maps to specific interests.
Lastly, as new technologies come into mainstream usage, they tend to disrupt
or change the way the mainstream does things. Think about the way instant
messaging has replaced Email in many circumstances. As Internet marketers
dream up new ways to present ideas and products, they advance thinking on
how to merge the most useful aspects of new communications technologies.
Users of the newest version of MSN IM will soon see contextual advertising
based on their current conversation appearing where banner ads now appear.
For the past two years, interest in pay-per-click search advertising has
dominated the search engine marketing environment. Easily explained and
understood, PPC offers definite answers to advertisers and more control
over ad-placements than any other form of mass-marketing, on or off-line.
PPC offers tangible, reportable results gained from a predictable investment.
It also offers a flexibility that no other form of mass marketing can facilitate.
PPC has also been a cash cow for the search engines themselves. Interest
in PPC allowed Google to go public fifteen months ago and paid-advertising
account for the vast majority of Google’s revenues. Yahoo, MSN, AOL,
and Ask have all modeled their businesses on the provision of contextually
delivered paid advertising.
The paid-per-click/call/action business model is obviously successful and
will almost certainly form one of the pillars of future paid advertising
venues offered by the major search engines.
A decade ago, the websites were littered with banner ads of every shape,
size and colour. Marketing costs were calculated based on how many times
the banner would appear in rotation with other advertising banners on a
site. As time moved on, these banners became more sophisticated, featuring
animations and even sound. The biggest problem with the model was that even
if people did click the banner ad, mainstream consumers had not yet adopted
online commerce. In other words, the chances of making a sale were often
dependent on the consumer using the traditional communications mediums of
voice and telephone to place an order. By the time the dot-com bubble burst
in 2000, banner ads had lost their luster and, as the dominant means of
Internet advertising, were on a steady decline. A new form of advertising
had taken form and for want of a pricing structure, it was totally free.
1999 was the year Google started to be known as the coolest thing since
spliced cable. Those were the days when being a geek was entirely chic.
The first stages of the SEO industry had already formed around Alta Vista,
Yahoo and Lycos but the Internet itself was just starting to be used by
most of the general public.
Google appeared at just the right time and in just the right format to
please the people and via the new fangled miracle of email, viral marketing
word-of-mouth testimonies drove millions to try it. It created a very big
and very sudden buzz, becoming the poster-child homepage of the millions
of new Internet users. In the mid to late 90’s, nearly everybody was
an Internet newbie and Google helped them find stuff fast.
Around the same time, consumers were starting to trust the Internet environment.
A similar phenomenon has been happening since the Google IPO last year.
The intense buzz created around Google has spurred interest in the rest
of the sector. Search marketing is about to become a lot more interesting
and, if previous trends hold true, much of the change will have a distinctly
organic flavour.
As advertisers, webmasters and search marketers take advantage of the emerging
possibilities, finding and sorting information through organic algorithms
will remain a core consistency for the search service providers. In other
words, while the rest of the search-advertising milieu evolves into more
complex and targeted forms of paid-ad distribution, most consumers will
still find those paid-ads (whatever format they take) and the documents
they are embedded in via organic search results.
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