Editorial Articles

Paid search has long been seen as the golden child of digital marketing. Explosive growth since 2002 has seen the industry become the largest online advertising channel, employing thousands of search specialists who manage billions of pounds of advertising spend per year. The appeal of paid search’s effectiveness, measurability and ‘targetability’ has helped the industry grow while traditional advertising has faltered. 

The businesses that have encountered the most success with paid search are those which have used innovative technology to manage and control complexity as their search programmes expanded exponentially. However, the search industry itself has not made it easy to do that.

Owing to the rapid growth in search spend and the growing popularity of the channel, adopting new solutions to run huge search campaigns successfully and efficiently has been a low priority. The stop gap measure was simply to hire more people. As a result, many search marketers are still reliant on an infrastructure of manual, dated technologies, such as spreadsheets, to manage campaigns that often consist of millions of keywords and pounds in expenditure. Obviously, using Excel for this purpose is highly labour intensive, incredibly complicated and brings real potential for human error.

Recent research by Jupiter Research found that 85% of large-scale search marketers think the complexity of their PPC campaigns is on the rise and the vast majority of them would spend more on search (an average of 22% more!) if the processes were more streamlined. This is not only a cry for more efficient processes, but it also reveals that advertisers and publishers are suffering because they have to wade through muddled, complex infrastructure.

In this challenging economic climate of 2009, and with the cessation (for agencies) of Google’s Best Practice Funding which acted as a ROI “ buffer zone” , should advertisers and agencies really be relying on home-grown solutions and archaic technologies to manage such a significant amount of spend?

The simple answer is no. Search marketers want and need to use systems that simplify the paid search process, allowing them to get back to real marketing rather than spending their days stitching together spreadsheet after spreadsheet. A simplified process, which allows search marketers to achieve a higher ROI on SEM spend seems like a real no-brainer. “Make more; spend less” is a mantra every business manager loves.

There comes a time in the evolution of every industry when the next generation of enabling technology is required in order to sustain growth. As budgets contract and the demands for immediate ROI increase, the paid search market has now entered that phase. Running a campaign inefficiently is never good, but the “fat times” covered up a multitude of sins. In these leaner times, running efficiently and improving performance goes from being a “nice to have” to a “must have”.

In the search industry, marketers need to make sure they have time to think and act like advertisers - spending their time considering their consumer, not getting bogged down in the mechanics of running large-scale search programs. The question is not whether new, more powerful search applications will gain market penetration, rather, which companies will improve their market position and leapfrog their competition by acting sooner rather than later. Infrastructure crisis? It’s up to you.


Ed Stevenson, European Managing Director, Marin Software

Sources:

¹ Jupiter Research/Marin Software Executive Survey, August 2008