October 22, 2009
If you’ve had a meeting in the last 3-6 months with a search engine account team, then you probably left the meeting frustrated. It appears that sometime in the last two quarters, the powers that be in the big 3 search engines have recognized advertiser’s dependency on them for strategy…so they’ve taken into their own hands to make the most of it. We’ve heard it all: “Holiday starts in October,” “Get ahead of the competition by ramping up spend,” “You’re missing 50% of available impressions…why not increase bids to get more market share [regardless of performance]?” Here’s my question: When did the search engines make the conscious decision to stop caring about customer satisfaction and begin to make recommendations with their own best interests at the forefront of the discussion? At least they used to pretend that advertiser performance was top of mind.
To be fair, this is not indicative of every team I have worked with. Some teams are more capable than others, and teams that handle more mature programs tend to deliver fewer of these pitches – instead focusing on new products beta tests. more from Benny…
1 Comment | 
SEM, paid search, search engine marketing | Tagged: account, bid management, impressions, marketing, online, paid search, search engine, search engine marketing, SEM | 
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Posted by esearchvision
October 2, 2009
by: Joshua Krafchin
The beauty of paid search marketing is that results are highly trackable. We can trace revenue back not only to the keyword and match type level, but also by the hour or even by the geography of the original search queries typed into any search engine. This extensive tracking provides us the opportunity to understand not only revenue and cost implications, but a whole host of other criteria from visitor interaction with our website to offline conversions and gross margin. With this surplus of data and choice though, many marketers run into the dilemma of how exactly to define success. Shifting general business priorities outside of search, whether or not they relate to search specifically, can directly impact how we manage a search program.
One of the big tug-of-wars is between ROI and volume. Because search is so measurable and trackable, companies have come to expect hitting and surpassing ROI numbers. In turn, this ability to consistently hit ROI makes paid search revenue highly desirable, and executives will push for more and more revenue volume from paid search. Read the rest of this entry »
2 Comments | SEM, Trends, eSearchVision General, paid search, search engine marketing | Tagged: business, client, goals, ROI, SEM | Permalink
Posted by esearchvision
