Display and search - are search marketers becoming the new media planners

Chalk and cheese? Oil and water? Facebook users and MySpace users? Just how different are search marketers and display advertisers?

Just three years ago, these two groups of people would be completely segmented, often sitting at opposite ends of an agency office, rarely collaborating on projects and with a slight dislike of each other.

Their ways of working were very different, their basic principles were alien to each other, and the amount of free gifts received at Christmas by media planners always turned an angry eye from the search marketers, long since forgotten by the Google gift giving machine.

I even remember a new business pitch many years back where the media planner walked in and introduced themselves to the search marketer who shared his office, thinking it was the client!

A search marketer by nature is quantitative. Their world consists of spreadsheets, tiny details and a lot of testing. They are held to rigorous goals, with every click and conversion tracked to the last cent. There is little that is ambiguous in the search world.

Conversely, the display media planner is qualitative. Their world is more mad men than math men, involves broader concepts and lacks the certainty of the results it generates. Post-impression is king in this world – something that has never sat well with search marketers.

A Search & Display History Lesson

Slowly, the two worlds started to come together. Atlas and others started churning out reports stating that display + search is a 1+1=3 situation, that if run together, a magical uplift would occur.

These studies certainly had some validity, but lacked anything concrete to show why this was happening, and instead intimated that the presence of branded ads drive more people to search for brand terms. It was a tough sell to my old SEM colleagues at the time, but it had planted the seed.

Then along came Google, Yahoo and MSN to muddy the waters. Their sales teams had the ear of the SEM marketer, and went fairly unchallenged as they rolled out basic display offerings. They knew the value of the display media pie and wanted to cut as big a slice of it for themselves as possible.

Getting a search marketer to tick a box and extend a buy was a lot easier than asking a media planner to learn AdWords and start from scratch. And so, the search marketer started to get smarter and smarter about display.

I was in a full-service agency at the time running a display team, and started hearing of display ads running for display clients that my team wasn’t responsible for. My first reaction was common – I was protective of my budget and felt that these search marketers didn’t really know what they were doing with banners. But as I looked at the tools they were using, I realized they were better equipped than I was.

My group was reliant on AdRelevance and AdPlanner to tell us where to find people who might look like our prospects, but the search teams could specify exact parameters, getting far more granular then we ever could. And I was told about DoubleClick’s plans to launch an ‘exchange’ I realized the future looked very different to the present and I might just be on the wrong side of the fence.

What Does The Future Hold For Search & Display?

Today, quantitative skills are almost a pre-requisite for being in media planning. With the rise of the DSPs, the creation of ‘trading desks’ and the power of Facebook ads, the value of the qualitative media planner is diminishing quickly.

If the distance between the search marketer and the display planner was a canyon, then Facebook was the first master bridge builder – but they did it entirely by accident. They first started targeting display advertisers with a CPM offering, looking to soak up both brand and direct response budgets, getting on media plans with new formats and targeting techniques.

But as they rolled out CPC text ads, they attracted the expertise of the search marketer and almost isolated the display planner. I was caught short, losing the Facebook advertising budget for my clients to my search colleagues before I even realized it was happening!

Whilst the canyon still exists, more bridges are starting to appear, some easier than others to cross for both parties. Search Retargeting is quickly becoming the biggest traffic carrier, being reliant on the skills of both parties.

In essence, search retargeting finds those individuals who are searching on Google, Yahoo or Bing for the terms that matter to your campaign and allows you to put display ads in front of them. It can be bought on a CPM or a CPC model, and can be (and should be) optimized to the keyword level.

It is a constantly evolving program, with decisions being made daily based on exact data points. The smart search marketers are sprinting across the bridge with everything they have, realizing that there are pots of (display budget) gold on the other side.

It also lacks some of the barriers that other types of display have to the unfamiliar. Companies like ours will provide dynamic creative, inserting the keyword searched for into the unit and most importantly, as a technique, search retargeting does not require the usual raft of pixels adding to the site that a site retargeting program would require.

In my role at Chango, a search retargeting company, I meet with both search marketers and display media planners to talk about search retargeting, each seeing it as the way to steal each other’s dollars. And whilst we often will bring in members of each team to be the most successful, it seems that search marketers are often the more willing to learn and test with this type of program. It is not that they are smarter, or even more innovative, it is because many of them realize they can own this evolving media world and make themselves more relevant.

Also, as one search marketer said to me this week, their day to day job isn’t very exciting if it just involves keyword optimization and reporting, but they can now see new career opportunities for themselves and are getting to experiment with cool new tools.

The search marketer is already becoming the future media planner, but as the traffic across the bridge flows both ways, could the media planner become the future search marketer?

According to the survey, 27% of respondents say that search engine marketing is responsible for more than half of their online sales. (See chart at left.) 47% say that more than a quarter of their web sales stem from search engine marketing. That includes both PPC- and SEO-driven sales.

As far as traffic is concerned, 51.5% of respondents say that more than a quarter of their web site traffic comes from natural search; 28% say that more than a quarter comes from paid search advertising.

A whopping 89% of respondents said they get at least 50% of their search engine traffic from Google, with 19% saying Google sends more than 90% of the traffic they get. The survey doesn’t specify if that’s traffic from both paid and natural search, though.

There are some interesting numbers that relate specifically to paid search and Google vs. Bing/Yahoo.

44.6% of respondents say they increased their paid search budgets in the past year, and 49% say they plan to increase it in the year ahead. Almost half, 43.4% said they plan to shift some of their paid search advertising to Bing in the coming year. And of that 43.4%, 17.6% say they’ll be shifting money from their Google advertising budget.

The survey was shared in Internet Retailer’s latest e-mail newsletter. You can see several charts that summarize the survey results on InternetRetailer.com.

Marin Software:

Marin Search Marketer will provide marketers with the tools necessary to manage large-scale advertising programs through Facebook Ads. By marrying impression, click, and cost data with conversion and revenue data, Marin Search Marketer will provide a complete view of campaign ROI and effectiveness. Management capabilities within the analytical interface will allow users to edit bids and creative individually or in bulk, to provide a streamlined workflow from analysis to action.

Understanding the impact of Facebook Ads on other advertising channels is a critical requirement for performance marketers. Marin Search Marketer will attribute conversion value across the clicks leading up to a sale, allowing users to understand, for example, the impact of Facebook ads on driving downstream clicks on paid search links and their ultimate impact on conversions. Using this solution, marketers will be able to properly value the impact of Facebook advertising on both immediate and latent conversion, and adjust campaign budgets accordingly.

Clickable:

Clickable Pro now empowers you to create and upload pay-per-click Facebook ads in bulk. And with Clickable conversion tracking, you can track Facebook and search marketing revenues and conversions with a simple tag placed on your Web site. You can even produce customized, white-label reports with search and social performance displayed side by side. You can do it yourself in Clickable, or let us do it for you with our Assist offering. Sign up now and a Clickable representative will help you get started

Kenshoo:

The new Facebook integration expands the power of Kenshoo’s existing online SEM advertising optimization platform to offer increased marketing program visibility and control to both agencies and advertisers. Marketers can now take advantage of Kenshoo’s automated RealTime Campaigns technology, full multi-channel tracking and algorithmic bid optimization technology to further their online marketing dollar.

Expect more search marketing toolsets and platforms to follow. This is a significant development for several reasons:

• It formalizes the relationship between search and social media (search and display), including reporting (which is huge)
• It makes Facebook Ads accessible through a single platform, which will likely dramatically benefit Facebook as it becomes easier to buy and manage campaigns on Facebook (hopefully the quality of ads will improve greatly)
• It will make Facebook, with its very precise targeting capabilities one of the primary display ad outlets on the internet, perhaps to the detriment of other display networks

Here are the top four big changes, in my mind:

Google changes its trademark policy

On June 15, 2009, Google changed its trademark policy to make it easier for advertisers to use brand names in ad copy text. Prior to this change, Google restricted the use of brand names in ad text and was willing to take action to prevent it, allowing brand owners to authorize specific resellers to use the brand, while blocking everyone else. Under the new policy, Google allows previously disapproved ads to run on Google.com and the content network in the USA without the need for approval by the trademark owner. Essentially, anyone, except for direct and obvious competitors, are able to use your brand in their ads. For more on these changes, see my How To Protect Your Brand Under Google’s New Trademark Policies.

Google adds product images and pricing to paid search

Google more closely linked comparison shopping with AdWords sponsored listings with several new developments:

Product Extensions. If you search on keywords such as “snowboard pants,” you will notice a plus icon associated with a single advertiser accompanied by the following text: “Show Products From [brand] for [brand] pants.” Clicking on the plus sign launches a list of products beneath the ad, with images, titles and prices of products. This feature enhancement to AdWords is called “Product Extensions.” While it has been in beta testing for a period of time, Product Extensions launched in the USA to all advertisers on November 24, 2009. To use Product Extensions requires a Google Merchant Center account tied to your AdWords ad text. Product Extension enhanced ads are priced on a CPC basis. You can find details on Google’s blog here: http://adwords.blogspot.com/2009/11/product-extensions-available-to-all-us.html

Product Listing Ads.. If you search on keywords such as “snowboard jackets” you will see a list of products in positions four, five and six on the right rail along with an image, title, and price for multiple different advertisers. Product Listing Ads launched on November 11, 2009 in beta to a select group of retail advertisers and are priced on a CPA basis. Participation requires a Google Merchant Center account and an invitation from Google. You can find details on Google’s Blog here: http://adwords.blogspot.com/2009/11/announcing-product-listing-ads.html

YouTube Promoted Videos. Promoted Videos are CPC-based ads that can be purchased through YouTube or AdWords. I covered these sponsored listings and their impact on brand searches in Search, Video & Your Brand: Hello YouTube. Here is a timeline to its evolution:

• March 9, 2009: YouTube officially names its sponsored ads “Promoted Videos”
• October 2, 2009: Promoted videos are added to AdSense publishers
• October 14, 2009: Promoted videos are available to purchase through AdWords
• October 14, 2009: Promoted videos expand from the USA to Canada, the U.K., France, Italy, Germany, Spain and the Netherlands.

Microsoft Live Search becomes Bing; Bing to power Yahoo search

On July 29, 2009, Bing and Yahoo announced an agreement to work together on search, with Bing controlling technology and Yahoo controlling sales and revenue efforts. This agreement was finalized on December 4, 2009 (though is still subject to regulatory approval). How does this effect your brand? A few quick positives that can come from this for you: (1) Consolidation into one platform means you need only manage ads from one place rather than two, and (2) Bing seems to allow for brand exclusivity. Try the query “ebay auctions” for example on Bing vs. Google.

There are plenty of other interesting events from 2009—please tell me about your favorites in the comments below.

Today I’m going to explore the systematic use of paid channels like AdWords and Facebook ads as channels for intervening in quickly moving public relations incidents. Ads can play an important role as powerful tools for supporting the usual tactics of social media and reputation monitoring/management campaigns. I’ll cite real-world transient PPC mashup scenarios for your own brainstorming.

What is a transient public relations event?

Positive and negative short-lived incidents come at businesses in waves, and often require a marketer’s fast attention. Sometimes they’re planned and other times not. Examples include:

• The New York Times features your brand on the front page Sunday morning.
• Your construction project will block a major city street and the public needs information.
• A brand’s rockstar sports-icon spokesperson gets busted for driving under the influence.
• A Mayo clinic researcher announces a breakthrough in the effort to cure breast cancer.
• You just opened a new manufacturing facility, gainfully employing dozens of local citizens with good jobs.
• Your CEO was just invited to a business lunch at the White House.
• The local university’s women’s hockey team just won the NCAA national championship.
• Any event, either abrupt or planned, that falls under the seven classic nodes of public relations.

Just like classic works of literature, these examples of transient public relations events have beginnings, middles and ends. When these pre-scheduled or accidental ephemeral happenings rear their pretty (or ugly) little heads, we must deal with them, maximizing potential benefits and/or minimizing real damage.

When it comes to transient PPC, we start by boiling things down to straight business objectives by asking the following questions about the episode at hand:

• How does the event affect the public’s perception, aligned with or contrary to our brand’s business objectives?
• Is rapid communication required to serve our customers, dispel misunderstandings, celebrate a victory, diffuse anger, communicate crucial information, stake out positioning to preempt an expected response or reap the benefits of something wonderful? In other words does the transient event warrant a response, to our advantage or defense?
• Would instant keyword domination in search engine results (SERPs) by PPC, in Bing, Yahoo and Google, give an edge in propagating our brand’s message? Is PPC appropriate in this instance and can it be executed tastefully to the brand’s advantage?
• If so, what is the appropriate keyword grid? Should the PPC net be cast further than direct brand name searches?
• Where should the traffic go? There are those who believe that PPC traffic should always point to a brand’s website landing page. Sometimes, though, the best path to branding efforts is to vector traffic to public social media profiles, independent publishers, federal agencies, news stories, press releases or other reputable third-party sites that offer independent opinions or validation.
• Would a Facebook ad be tactically useful and fitting? With over 300 million users, certain constituencies are readily accessible to the savvy marketer’s guile via Facebook advertisements.

Implementing a successful transient PPC campaign

Responsible run-and-gun PPC starts with an open mind and pre-planning. Scheduled events, like the corporate charity ball, product release or new vice presidential hire are theoretically easy. Break down traditional big brand barriers and encourage PR, marketing, advertising and event planning stakeholders to organize PPC support ahead of time.

PPC support of “events of the unplanned kind” can originate as part of the normal reputation-monitoring report and react grid. As a general rule, keywords that alert the online reputation management team about positive or negative situations are reasonable candidates for PPC targeting. It’s normal for brands to judge a suitable response to evolving situations.

Here are a few examples of transient events that could warrant a PR response. I’ll break each possible PPC campaign down by trigger event, keyword grid, goal, alternate goal, message, alternate message, destination URL geo-targeting and run length.

Example #1 – Trigger event (unplanned): Mid-authority blogger writes a complimentary article about a brand’s products and links to lead generation page.

• Keyword grid: Branded terms, category keywords.
• Goal: Send quiet traffic to reward blogs that support the brand. Garner good will in blog community. Delight bloggers who probably watch analytics and monitor their reputation.
• Alternate goal: Drive secondary traffic from blog post we’re supporting, back to our lead generation page.
• Message: “Introducing the [blogName] blog.”
• Alternate message: Use of the brand name.
• Geotargeting: National.
• Run length: One week, with a goal of diverting 30% of our normal direct brand searches to this blog.

Example #2 – Trigger event (planned): Brand’s parent company is hiring 45 new full time employees in a community of 65,000 and plans to build a new factory.

• Keyword grid: Branded terms, name of city, city services, HR recruitment searches for factory’s skill set.
• Goal: Brand quality of life and company commitment to community, visitors, locals and potential employees.
• Alternate goal: Raise awareness of brand/company to locals plugged in enough to seek out city services by internet search.
• Message: “[Brand], Proud to be a member of our community.”
• Alternate message: “We’re hiring.”
• Geotargeting: Statewide.
• Run length: One month – two weeks prior to factory opening and two weeks afterward.

Example #3 – Trigger event (unplanned): Brand product results in a child’s death and a product recall.

• Keyword grid: Branded terms, “child’s name,” [cause of death]
• Goal: Reassure the public, clarify what products are affected, and provide vital information for safety.
• Alternate goal: Links for SEO, with a plan for diffusing unflattering keywords from news and other high authority sites.
• Message: Disseminate straight-up information.
• Alternate message: “[Brand] cares and operates in the interest public’s safety first.”
• Geotargeting: Statewide.
• Run length: Indefinite as defined by daily SERPs testing, analytics, buzz, etc.

Example #4 – Trigger event (unplanned): The New York Times features your brand on its front page Sunday morning.

• Keyword grid: Branded terms, keywords customers use to vet the featured product (e.g “[product] review” and “[product] information.”
• Goal: Brand the product/company as worthy of such acclaim, to folks searching specifically for the brand.
• Alternate goal: Secondary traffic.
• Message: “Check out [brand] [product] in yesterday’s New York Times.”
• Alternate message: “[Brand] is notable, legitimate and mainstream.”
• Geotargeting: National.
• Run length: 1-3 weeks.

Paid search campaigns can be a valuable weapon for influencing perception with transient events, which traditionally are associated with public relations. Though not always appropriate, instant prominence via paid listings in SERPs can be a useful arrow in the marketing quiver. To be successful with such campaigns, it’s important to communicate clearly with other departments and pre-plan goals and tactics.

Here are some bits from the article:

Sprint is buying the top ads tied to phrases consumers tend to search for when they are close to making a purchase, such as “cellphone rate plans” and specific products like “Samsung Reclaim,” rather than more generic phrases they search for at the beginning of the shopping process, like “Sprint,” “AT&T” and “cellphone”  . . .

Volkswagen is coordinating its search marketing strategy with its network of 600 dealers across the country so it doesn’t end up competing against itself for the same terms and driving up prices…

[N]ew research from the search division of GroupM Search (a media buying and planning unit owned by ad holding company WPP) and online measurement firm comScore [ ] shows that consumers exposed to social media campaigns are likelier to search and click on that brand’s paid search ad.

“A few years ago, search was a little bit more progressive. Now, it’s mainstream,” says Simon McPhillips, director of media at Sprint. “The incumbents are trying to figure out, ‘What is the next new frontier?’

None of this is a surprise, nor do the examples above represent incredible sophistication on the part of marketers. It does however represent a widening of the “aperture” around search and search user behavior. As much as it may be driven by economics and not wanting to compete on brand or “generic” terms, which still constitute the majority of search queries, it reflects a better understanding that search queries occur in a larger context — of social media, display, traditional media and word-of-mouth-like viral behavior.

The article also speculates about how such trends are causing some slowing of search-ad spending at Google and how Google is pushing into other areas (display, video) as higher growth opportunities, as a consequence.

One of the most common points of conflict is perceived to be the moment when a business is asked to decide whether affiliates—for example, providers of voucher and coupon services or cash back sites—should be allowed to bid on trademark brand words. If they are allowed to do so, consumers entering “M&S” in the search engine, for example, will not only find the link to www.marksandspencer.com displayed on the search page, but also links to a number of websites offering discounts and vouchers for the purchase of Marks and Spencer’s products. If you use affiliates, it is up to you to ensure that your site comes out on top in search rankings, and affiliates are unlikely to bid on your brand so intensely that they knock you out of the top ratings.

If affiliates really are more popular than your company’s own ecommerce site—and they feature higher in the page rankings than the company’s own website—customers searching specifically for your brand are very likely to end up purchasing the product via a website other than your own. The lead gained will then have to be paid for by your company, somewhat reducing its value, even though the consumer would have clicked on your site and not the affiliate’s had the rankings been more favourable.

A burning issue for businesses that have experienced this shift in attribution of sales leads: are the high-ranking affiliates cannibalising sales or is it simply a case of improving the traffic to the brand’s own ecommerce site? Improving your paid-for search results as well as your natural results should be the pressing issue for a business whose affiliates are attracting more traffic than the main site. If the consumer typed in a specific brand term, they almost certainly have been influenced to some extent by the brand’s own marketing and advertising; failing to optimize search lets these efforts down in the last lap. Understandably, however, businesses feel that affiliates should not charge for leads generated on the back of promotional activity that is not their own.

Because the acquisitions made through affiliates carry an associated cost, marketers tend to devalue them. First, they deduct the cost per acquisition (CPA) charge for affiliates, then the cost for the brand’s own marketing effort—which often drives the consumer on to the search engine—and finally the extra bidding cost of trying to keep the brand at the top of the search results page. Most of the leads, however, are entirely new, so they do represent added value in spite of the cost.

There is, however, another important aspect to consider before letting fears of cannibalisation and plummeting return on investment (ROI) damage the relationship with affiliates. Google has recently relaxed its regulations against bidding on competitor trademark names in most countries. For example, when M&S bid on the term Interflora, M&S appeared on the same search page as the brand. Since Google currently has no regulations against competitor trademark term bidding, affiliates can bid on key brand terms in to keep competitors out of that all-important first search page. While affiliate bidding may add a fractional cost to the process of customer acquisition, competitors really are driving business away with their aggressive bidding.

If relationships with affiliates are managed more openly, concerns over the cannibalisation of traffic can be quelled. Last-minute solutions such as lowering commission budgets and suspending programmes are simply unacceptable and feed into the climate of “every man for himself” on which mistrust is based. Some businesses have even gone as far as making up excuses to legitimise suspension of affiliate programmes over Christmas, a time of the year that affiliates have been gearing up to as much as your own business.

A practical solution that prevents the unease sometimes associated with affiliate relationships is to suggest different rates of commission depending on the different type of lead or customer acquired. This way, for example, if the consumer provided by the affiliate turns out to be a returning customer who has previously bought through the ecommerce site, the payment can be set at a lower rate than if the consumer is an entirely new lead or a person whose custom is only available to the business through the intermediation of affiliates.

First impressions count

Search marketers spend countless hours figuring out how to connect consumers to a brand/product, and then articulate that in an ad that won’t get more than a mere glance.  But despite its short lifespan, an ad must be truthful, deliver value, and resonate with consumers.  In essence, it must set the foundation for a good first impression, which is arguably the most important aspect of building brand loyalty.  Moreover, creating such loyalty takes a mutual bond of trust between two entities—the brand and the consumer.  By capitalizing on first impressions, search marketers can start building trust with their customers and prospects.  This is accomplished by developing ads that clearly outline what they are going to do for them, and then delivering upon those promises.

Three elements of building brand loyalty with paid search

So is it really possible to build brand loyalty in a mere two seconds?  In a word, yes.  It all starts with a good first impression.  Below are three key elements that you should consider in your efforts to build brand loyalty with paid search.

1 – Relevance. Granted, quality score matters, and the inherent synergies between keywords, ad copy, and landing pages are critical factors in determining it.  However, marketers must recognize that it is trumped by something else entirely:  delivering a consistent message that is on target and resonates with consumers, from the first impression of ad copy to the content on your site.  Irrelevant keywords, copy, or destinations are the quickest way to ruin a first impression of a brand/product.   How so?  Think of it this way:  For all intents and purposes, a first impression is nothing more than a hunch.  When a consumer sees an ad, they choose to either act upon it or ignore it, based upon that feeling.  So when ad copy and landing pages are irrelevant to a search query, you are essentially instilling the idea that you cannot help the consumer, regardless of whether or not it is true.  The result of such irrelevancy should be obvious:  the consumer becomes frustrated, has the lasting impression that you do not have the product or service they need, and goes back to the search results to find a company that does.  Remember, search is a marketing distribution vehicle.  We push content out to consumers in hopes of converting it into a sale/lead, so make sure you are leveraging content that is relevant to users throughout the entire engagement process, and make every impression count.

2 – Messaging. Consistent and truthful messaging is paramount to building brand loyalty with your audience.  Why?  Because it is fundamental to building trust, and trust is key to any relationship.  Given that, we must do whatever it takes to build this trust with our customers and prospects.  And messaging plays a key role in developing this trust, including the messaging in ads that are displayed in the search results, and the copy on landing pages.  Just as you are asking consumers to eventually buy your products, they are expecting you to be truthful in your ads.  For example, consider the messaging “free coffee.”  Obviously, it implies that a consumer will receive some coffee for free.  When the destination page delivers upon the ad’s promise, it builds trust between the user and the brand.  However, if the landing page does not have the free coffee theme built into it, a disconnect occurs.  The result?  The consumer will bounce, and their trust in the brand will be damaged.

3 – Feedback process. Implementing a feedback process is crucial to building brand loyalty within paid search.  By listening to your consumers, you can tap into a wealth of knowledge and gain tremendous insight.  But feedback should not be limited to just what your customers have to say (via phone, email, forums etc.), as their behavior on the engines and on your site is also very telling.  Understanding what people are doing with your ads—or more importantly, what they are not doing with them—gives you the opportunity to implement significant changes to your ad copy strategy and increase click through rates (CTR).  But focusing on one metric is never a good idea.  Instead, simultaneously analyzing metrics like bounce rates and CTR can help you tap into even better consumer insights.  For instance, you may have a compelling ad with a high CTR, but if you don’t examine the correlation between it and the high bounce rate of the landing page it is driving users to, then you’ll miss the opportunity to improve the situation, and suffer the consequence:  decreased user engagement, and diminished chances of building trust and loyalty.  Ultimately, search marketers need to work to find creative ways to uncover this vital feedback and leverage it to build brand loyalty.

Though it rarely gets credit for it, paid search can do much to help build brand loyalty.  To fully capitalize on these important first impressions as a brand building tool, search marketers need to make every interaction count by making their content relevant, providing truthful and consistent messaging, and listening to their audience through engine and site metrics.  In doing so, they can help turn customers and prospects into brand loyalists.

The respondents/clients represented a range of industries. The top sectors were “retail, business services, electronics manufacturing and financial services.”

As part of the findings and related report SEMPO forecast that SEM spending would grow from a projected $14.7 billion in 2009 to $26.1 billion in 2013. SEM is defined broadly as all spending on search-related marketing including SEO. Consequently it represents more than the share of online ad revenues that the IAB assigns to search.

The report is lengthy and extremely detailed. Among other things it explores what marketers are willing to pay for specialized offerings or enhanced targeting including behavioral, local and mobile. Here are some of the high-level findings:

• In the past three years, offline channels are most frequently cannibalized to move budget towards SEM. This year, the top marketing channels advertisers are shifting budgets from are print magazines (26%), direct mail (21%), and print newspapers (19%).
• However, the degree to which certain channels are cannibalized is a bit lower than in last year’s survey. Only a quarter of advertisers (26 percent) report they are shifting budgets from print magazine advertising (down from a third last year), and only 15 percent of advertisers are cannibalizing their web site development budgets. Other channels affected by a shift in spending include TV advertising (13 percent), conferences (10 percent) and print yellow pages (9 percent).
• Organic SEO has always been the favored search marketing tactic among advertisers, but its popularity has risen significantly, from 80% in 2005 and 76% in 2006, nine out of ten advertisers using it the past two year.
• Advertisers are most willing to pay a premium for targeting consumers based on behavioral metrics followed by demographic targeting
• There is growing interest in new platforms for search marketing such as video and mobile search, and growing willingness to pay more for these emerging vehicles

In the context of the debate surrounding whether search is a branding or direct response medium, one of the most interesting findings was that respondents said “brand awareness” was the top goal of paid search, which took over from “sales” in the previous year’s report. The larger the firm the more the goal shifts from sales to brand awareness, which makes a certain amount of logical sense. Still I found it interesting.

Some charts from the report:

Where are marketers transferring budgets from to support paid search?

Source: SEMPO/Radar Research (2/09)

Overall the report shows the search industry to be maturing and increasingly sophisticated, diversifying into a range of related digital media.

I don’t want to stray too far off into a tangent, but terminology has been rapidly shifting about, so I’ll touch on that briefly. “Domaining” is the practice of buying domain names, with the intent of later selling them at a profit. “Domaineering” is a relatively new term the industry is employing to refer to obtaining domain names to use as an advertising medium.

Frequently, domaineers seek to buy valuable keyword domains that people might reasonably go to directly as “type-in traffic” and then park ad content on them, making PPC revenue off the clicks of users who come to the site.

Cybersquatters are unethical domainers or domaineers who obtain trademarked and service-marked terms as domain names in order to make money off of the intellectual property of others. In most cases these days, cybersquatters cannot compel companies to buy back their own marks as domains, since those companies can often force the cybersquatter to relinquish the domain without profit. So, cybersquatters are more frequently taking the domaineering route, buying up domains, and keeping a low profile while profiting off of the clickthroughs of the ads targeted to the victimized brand names. (Such variant brand name domains can also be sold for profit on the gray market.)

So, how do they get away with it—why aren’t they noticed?

Unethical domaineers are highly adept at generating variations upon brand name domains. They register common misspellings of brand name domains, frequently occurring typos, lookalike domains and related stems (registering a plural for a singular term, for instance).

When I used to work for Verizon (now Idearc) Superpages.com, I occasionally assisted the intellectual property department in policing and referring infringing domains over to them for handling. Although back when the new company name was launched Verizon proactively registered a great many of these variant names and used MarkMonitor to help watch for more, there were always new product names being introduced that allowed openings for cybersquatters and character combinations that their monitoring missed. (Not to mention, the IP department seemed more hyper-focused on “Verizon” name derivatives, and less on satellite brands like “Superpages.com”.)

Over time, I’ve run across a great many cases of cybersquatting—not just with Verizon, but also with a really large number of major name-brand sites.

It took me only a few minutes to find some examples like these:

• www.cokacola.com
• www.veriz0n.com
• www.verizpn.com
• www.g00g1e.com
• www.1bm.com
• www.micr0s0ft.com
• www.go0gle.com
• www.g0ogle.com
• www.googlw.com
• www.microosft.com

While you can imagine that these major name brands like Coca-Cola, Verizon, Google, IBM and Microsoft are all big targets for this sort of thing due to their high popularity, lesser brands are also targets for this and are frequently far less well policed. (As of the time of writing this article, none of these domains are pointing to the official sites of the brand names the domains are based upon.)

Many of these types of domains are essentially stealing brand traffic—they are brand parasites. Even worse, a number of the major brand companies involved are actually paying the parasites to do this! You can often find PPC ads from the victimized companies appearing on the typosquatting sites, and money also passes to innocent affiliates and distributors whose ads also appear on these sites. Innocent or no, the money often should be going to you directly rather than going through them due to a bogus domain.

Stop paying parasitic middlemen, and take back your brand! Force the bad guys to relinquish infringing domains, and get them pointed directly at your site!

Using their same methodologies, seriously consider registering other variant names and 301 redirect all of them to your main site.

While an individual misspelling may bring you relatively small amounts of traffic, this sort of long-tail-brand-traffic can definitely add up over time. A single brand name can have quite a lot of potential misspelling and typo variations as well—in bulk, the traffic from all of these could actually give your site a small bump up.

Also, if you proactively block the unethical domainers from nabbing your brand-variation domains, you’ll save money you’d pay to them in advertising fees and money you’d pay to affiliates, and your legal department would be saved considerable time and money in the long run.

Just as a best practice, misspellings of your brand/domain names should be registered by you and 301 redirected to your main domain.

Here’s a list of types of domain name variations that squatters exploit:

• Word stems – plural and singular forms of words, other versions associated with the word (example: ”macy.com“ );
• Misspellings – (common/uncommon misspellings, phonetic spellings)
• Typos
• Versions of words with various letters dropped off
• Versions of words with extra letters inserted (such as adding extra “www” at beginning of names) Ex: wwwgoogle.com
• Transposed letters
• Lookalikes: domains with various letters exchanged for other characters which closely resemble them
• Other permutations – multiple-word domains with dashes or underscores separating the words
• Homophones or phonetic spellings (example: EyePhone.com)
• Domains with another Top Level Domain (“TLD”) suffix, such as .NET, .BIZ, .INFO, .FR, .BE, .IT, .DE, etc.
• Domains of your name translated into the equivalent word(s) in another language?

Since there can be various combinations of all of the above, there are many combinations possible for a company’s brand names! And, don’t just limit it to the company name alone. All a company’s marks should be checked for this sort of thing.

Nearly everyone who owns a domain name has got a domainer cleverly receiving traffic when people mistype the “.COM” part of their domain names—if you leave out the “O”, you end up getting redirected to an affiliate site, an ad, or to a parked domain page. Ex:

• www.microsoft.cm

This is because the famous domainer, Kevin Ham , made a deal with the country of Cameroon to allow him to wildcard any unregistered domain name traffic for the .CM TLD.

And, there have long been rumors he might eventually persuade the Colombian governing body to allow a similar arrangement with the “.CO” TLD!

There are tools out there which can help you to automatically generate lists of variation words to use as domain names, if you want to police your brand.

One of the best tools for this used to be a Microsoft research project, Strider URL Tracer with Typo-Patrol—it was once my favorite tool. Unfortunately, this project is no longer being supported and upgraded by Microsoft.  I wish they’d bring it back!

There are others out there as well such as this one. There’s also a number of desktop software packages which do the same sorts of things.

If you’re not adept at this, though, you might also consider hiring someone who can assess your unique situation, generate the brand name permutation lists, check them for squatters, and then recommend ongoing strategies to you. As you can see, these guys are clever, and not everyone can think like them.

If you have a major name-brand and are a publicly traded company, it really behooves you to find the cases of cybersquatting associated with your brand names, and force the owners to relinquish them to you (unless it is a “fair use”). This is a necessary part of protecting your marks. Buy up other variations of your domain as well, and 301 redirect all of these back to your main homepage. By doing this you can save money by cutting out the parasites and middlemen, and you can also increase your organic traffic through all those long-tail-brand domain referrals that start rolling up into your homepage.