April 17, 2006 Comments
An article over at Business Week talks about "the lowly search ad" and the "hucksterism" that goes into the "cryptic text come-ons" that display beside search results on popular search engines. The interesting thing is that Business Week, which is often on the mark when it comes to search engine marketing, seems to completely miss the boat in their characterization of paid search ads.
The article presents paid search advertising as being "slightly below "classified ad" and slightly above "poorly Xeroxed Herbalife flyer stapled to a telephone pole." The problem with this is that it focuses on the "perception" that some people in the advertising industry have rather than the reality of what paid search can really offer. Paid search ads still fall into the category of "I don't understand" for many marketers and the simplistic nature of them leaves many believing that they couldn't possibly be effective.
The article goes on to give several examples of companies using these ads, but the examples given tend to focus on campaigns that deliver lots of visitors without any talk of the effectiveness of those campaigns.
For example:
The current Element campaign features the vehicle "talking" to sundry animals -- a platypus, a possum, a burro, and a crab -- in cartoony spots. Honda's agency, Rubin Postaer & Associates, bought those keyword terms and uses search ads as invitations to "see the platypus in its Element." That link leads consumers to elementandfriends.com, which features Element ads and a related game. RPA also bought variants of "funny video" and "funny commercials," which, says Mike Margolin, RPA's vice-president/associate media director, are search terms that have demographic profiles compatible with likely Element buyers. In many cases, the search terms cost just 10 cents or 15 cents per click, he says, and drew about 40% of the Element's Web site traffic. "It seemed a little quirky, but the more you thought about it, the more it seemed to resonate well with the campaign," says Tom Peyton, Honda's senior manager of marketing.
The problem here is that these types of campaigns focus predominantly on the amount of traffic that they can produce rather than on the number of conversion that they produce. As I've said time and time again, paid search advertising is about buying customers, it's not about buying visitors. While big name brands like Honda can likely afford to pour dollars into something focused simply on building brand awareness and on generating "views," most small business owners need to get more from their paid search campaigns.
That's where I find this article to be disappointing. The article presents these types of campaigns as the only "worthwhile" campaigns to be run on paid search engines. That's not only untrue, it's also a bit dangerous in the hands of the wrong individuals. That said, there were a few on-the-ball statements about the benefits of paid search ads:
...search ads' value still escapes many otherwise savvy media executives. In a public appearance last year, Vanity Fair's Editor-in-Chief Graydon Carter noted that while he used Google often he never remembered the ads nearby. But recall is not what search ads are about. They're about enabling a more direct link to commerce than a TV or magazine ad. The pay-per-click model gives marketers an easy metric to calculate a price per lead
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