Search Budget Trending: The New Balance of Organic vs. Paid
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Written By Kate Zimmermann | September 26, 2006 | Share This
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(Moderated by Mark Naples, WIT Strategy, with speakers: Bryan Wiener - 360i, Chris Copeland - Outrider, Joshua Stylman - Reprise Media, Chris Boggs - Avenue A | Razorfish)
Organic vs. Paid
One of the few purely search sessions of the day, the panelists started out with discussion about how to use organic vs. paid search for a long term or short term campaign. Josh Stylman expressed that different clients have different needs – for example, an entertainment company needs to promote content immediately, and may therefore prefer a short-term campaign with a heavy emphasis on paid search. While paid and organic are not mutually exclusive, you may shift your budget more heavily towards paid search or organic, depending on the goal of the campaign. Bryan Wiener added that paid and organic should be tracked together, because data shows that a large portion of users toggle between the two (product terms for paid, brand terms for organic). Josh agreed and said that it’s a huge mistake to have an obsession with absolute rank. Ranking #1 for irrelevant term won’t get you anywhere, and often, “the whole is greater than the individual parts” – the same money that buys a #1 position might buy ten #3 positions that convert better and have a broader audience. Furthermore, though 70% of all users click on natural search, a far greater number of transactions culminate from clicks to paid search. Thus, search marketing is unique because it’s “perhaps the most elegant form of creative marketing.” In other words, it’s the only vehicle in which users and marketers have a real time dialogue. As a result, said Stylman, there is a greater need for quality analytics in search marketing. Paid search is becoming more about creating a holistic campaign, rather than merely managing bids, and marketers should be aware of the cross-platform impact.
Social Media and Search
The panelists agreed that social media will increasingly become a “cornerstone” to search because it involves a lot of rich content that promotes search engine visibility. Consumers, however, can’t be controlled, which makes social media risky. The most marketers can do is engage the “proactive dialogue” of social media. Paid search, for example, can be used to target people in their social networks by using contextual ads as part of the conversation.
Mark Naples remarked, “we don’t have any powerpoint slides because we wanted this forum to be as interactive as possible.” My initial reaction was, “yeah right, or you’re just lazy,” which provoked the thought that “interactivity” and creating “opportunities for user-generated content” can easily translate to laziness on the part of the company. There is a session coming up called, “Campaigns that seek out consumers will fail, Campaigns that consumers seek out will succeed,” where I’m hoping this dilemma will be addressed.
Moving back, to the topics at hand…
Paid Inclusion
Would Google be better if they had a paid inclusion system? Would it make them any worse?
Josh beleived that paid inclusion is hard to scale (coming from his own experience at the former Ask Jeeves). Spiders are scalable, but paid inclusion requires an opt-in on a person to person basis. As a result, content that shouldn’t be left out gets left out. One could also make the case that the trend is to cooperate with content providers - Google base for example, is more like a paid inclusion program than anything else. Deeper vertical search engines that DO charge for paid inclusion are growing in popularity, because they don’t have to be scaled. It’s important for search marketers to be aware of this vertical shift.
Metrics
The panelists report an increasing trend of incorporating cross-platforms. On and offline marketing has to be leveraged together, thus metrics will eventually grow more sophisticated to keep up with cross-platform advertising. (this was the biggest ‘duh’ moment of the session, but it’s still an important point).
Q & A
- Question: To the panelists, what is your opinion about word of mouth marketing? Are you using it? And if so, how do “nodes of conversation” get incorporated into paid search campaigns?
Answer: Word of Mouth is like the new Yahoo! Buzz Index. Communities are being set up and can be seen as the front edge of paid search campaigns and SEO integration. At the moment, marketers are primarily using buzz tracking it for keyword discovery. - Question: Are focus groups dead? And if so, how does search marketing tap into the “ongoing focus group” of internet dialogue?
Answer: Paid search lets you track everything, to see which queries are actually being used. Entertainment companies especially will depend on being able to measure that buzz to glean valuable “focus group” information. as previously stated, measurement technology will follow demand for new metrics. - Question: What is over-optimization? Can too much optimization cause a negative effect on your campaign?
Answer: Marketers have to keep in mind that there are two audiences for every website – the crawler and the user. What appeals to one may not appeal to the other, so websites have to draw a fine line between the two. For example, keyword-rich text that might improve search rankings could detract from usability. On the other hand, flash content that aids usability can detract from organic search. At the end of the day, however, it’s best to “design with the human in mind.”
I would like to add that over-optimization can include fragmenting a single page between too many different terms, thus confusing the spider and the user. This doesn’t necessarily support “keyword density” (a slightly outdated idea), but emphasizes that marketers should focus each page to a single bucket of relevant terms. - Question: Will search engines eventually have more personalized search results?
Answer: Yes, but at the moment, the largest roadblock to behaviorally-enhanced search results is privacy. Personalized search requires collecting a lot of user data that people will need the option to opt into or out of.
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