Yahoo:
Now have to pay both a flat fee and a per-click fee ...you have to have the kind of business model that's going to support paying .15 per visitor. Take ClickZ as an example; you're a publisher. Do you guys make .15 on an eyeball? Most publishers don't. You may have a lot of advertising, but you're still probably only going to make .08 per click. If you're paying for visibility at .15 a click, you're losing money on Yahoo! traffic.
Contextual advertising (Adsense..)
contextual advertising is banner advertising with words. I've seen statistics showing that while the conversions are similar to search, the clicks are closer to those of banners. I pay a lot less for banner ads than I do for search advertising. For a run of network ad buy, the average CPM (cost per 1,000 impressions) is $4 or $6. So why am I paying $2 per click? Just because you tell me it's relevant?
Locally targeted search marketing:
It'll eventually open up a much larger market, but only once it becomes a common buy for the small advertisers. I think they're going to have a year or so getting traction on that. Small advertisers are just now hearing about search marketing. (The really big advertisers are also just starting to experiment with it. It's everyone in the middle that's leading the way.)
Personalization:
The problem with personalization is it attempts to automate the human mind. You can't do that. You just can't. Google has done a pretty good job of mapping our social network. But to do that on the level of the individual mind? Knowing how many personal searches I do in a day, how many different kinds of searches for different clients, I'm sure [my personalized results] would be a muddled mess by the time two weeks had past. It makes the assumptions that people are a certain way all the time.
What threats does SEM face right now? Is there a risk of a bubble?
It's a small bubble, but it's a bubble. It's a piece of the overall bigger bubble, which is that Internet advertising is back. There's a belief, certainly in our organization, that part of that credibility factor was contributed by SEM. That's why advertisers are coming back. They're starting to see results, due to the fact that SEM is so metrics driven.
Q.What's the big picture for SiteLab's search business right now?
A.A lot of search agencies are saying, we've pretty much maxed out the search market. This happens when you hit the top. If you can buy all the potential inventory in your keyword areas, you start to see a flat line. You have effectively cornered the search engine market share. There is no more, because it is driven by consumer demand.
Their next question to me is, "We want more traffic, so what should we do?" That's when we start looking at the banners, e-mail and other ad methods.
(And pops sometimes work, by the way. It's not huge, but it's good enough. In some cases, because the distribution is so large, pop-ups can be very effective, particularly the very targeted networks like Claria. Not every single one of our tests on Claria has worked, but those that do are very impressive.)
posted by Jen @ 7:02 AM
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