Search advertising works, perhaps too well. It's easy to use, and the results are easy to measure. That's led many midmarket companies to allocate large chunks of their marketing budgets to search advertising, but while this approach may garner results now, in a few years, an overreliance on search advertising may leave you wondering where all your customers went.
Of all the reasons to cling to search advertising, ease of use may be the most adhesive. Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) has made AdWords almost painless; it’s no wonder the search leader dominates, not only the search advertising market, but many companies’ search marketing spend.
A recent New York Times article chronicling the search advertising efforts of custom card maker Tiny Prints described how the self-service nature of Google AdWords makes it possible for a small inhouse team to handle the company’s entire search ad program. More significantly, the article profiled how Tiny Prints allocates 90 percent of its search ad budget to Google AdWords.
For Internet marketing, betting big on AdWords has become the contemporary equivalent of “No one ever got fired for buying IBM.” As the safe, established choice, Google dominates the market, and the resulting revenue has fueled Google’s continued success from sprawling data centers to library digitization to cloud computing to smartphones.
But the not-so-secret trend is that, despite the billions flowing to Google from search advertising, growth is slowing. As the search advertising market matured, that was bound to happen, but it’s the recent mass migration to social networks that stands to change search advertising from the dominant vehicle to merely one of many ways to entice customers.
Shifting marketing spend to social networks should, rightly, give midmarket companies pause, because the ROI case is hard to make right now. With search advertising, the results are clear and available; you can make real-time adjustments and see the impact immediately. Businesses simply can’t achieve that type of precision on social networks right now. In fact, 84 percent don't even measure ROI for their social media programs, according to a Mzinga and Babson Executive Education survey conducted earlier this year.
Soon enough, though, the Hobson’s choice of strong ROI versus no ROI may be a quaint memory, as light begins to escape from the social media analytics black hole. Firms like PostRank have introduced analytic tools that measure engagement rather than simply traffic; and the best practices and standards for social media marketing are coming into clearer focus. Not to mention that Google is developing ways to incorporate the sharing, tweeting, linking, and retweeting that have become staples of online interaction into its citation-based search algorithm. The analytics will inevitably follow through internal development -- or acquisition.
Smart midmarket firms can't wait for Google -- or another vendor -- to make advertising on social networks as turnkey as AdWords is for search today. The interest is building; the customers are out there. It's time to go get them.
— Benjamin Tomkins is a frequent contributor to business and consumer publications who has never strayed far from technology in his 15-year career.
Social Media does have power, but that power seems to be fading. With the growing trend of people getting tired of social media sites and deleting their accounts, does it make sense to make an investment in monitoring the ROI on social media? The status quo might be the most economical practice.
It's true that analytics for social media are getting better. But no amount of tracking blog comments, tweets, and facebook status updates is going to lead to a reasonable calculation of ROI.
For one thing, social media is a branding arena. Sponsoring a conversation related to your product will, in a best case scenario, build brand loyalty, get people to think and talk about your brand in a positive light, and lead to a handful of purchases worth far less than the cost of the campaign.
Search is mostly a direct-response area. The customer is looking for something, and you help them find it, and then you sell it to them. Or maybe they weren't planning to buy anything, but their search and your ad and product align so well that they buy anyway.
For another thing, tracking ROI in adwords is easy, but in social media, it's a technological mess. It's not like tracking engagement at all.
With adwords, you give the user a cookie as soon as they click, and that cookie will let you know at point of purchase that they came in through the ad. Ca-ching! Your ROI has just improved. You can tell exactly how much you spent on that click, and you can tell exactly how much you made on that sale.
With social media, you are almost by definition sending a message across diverse platforms that do not share cookies in the same way. Sure, you could sponsor a blog, and cookie users who visit the blog, and then see how many of those users buy the product. But if your campaign is good, it probably extends to sites that you don't have that kind of control over... private blogs that write about it, Twitter, Facebook, RSS feeds, and industry insider sites like this one.
Even if you manage to pull everyone who encounters the message back to a site that has been cookied, you probably won't sell to most of them in the short term if your campaign was designed properly. That's because social media is a branding space. Users respond well to a sponsored conversation that's interesting to them, but only if they don't feel pressure to buy while they're having it.
Good point. From a user's standpoint, I do tend to be more relaxed and open to ads that come from social networking sites. I guess that also determines which brands should capitalize on social networks and which brands should stay in search.
ROI may seem simple and good, but all good is not simple. It would be nice if social network 'adwords" would in fact sell well for advertisers. But, the clicks on a social network would have to equal the percent click-throughs on search. I suspect the numbers won't work and the smaller percent click-throughs may not be subject to exactness in dependable statistics.
If the Internet and Social media have shown us anything it is the power of text.
The Internet is a medium of text, from chatting to blogs to Twitter.
The paragraph in articles and in comments is probably the sweet spot of text.
'Search engines' are not really that, so much as content aggregators that offer smogasboards of web pages and then leave it up to the human to choose.
The fact is, search engines don't search...people do. And now that there are so many social networks, and people getting to know each other as experts, we are doing more and more of our search by going to places we know about and looking for information there.
In software development, each day I learn where to look for what. Right now, I'm doing far more searching on the forum at JBoss.org than I do on Google. Maybe I found the site initially from Google, but after that, I take off the training wheels and go to where I need to be.
In social networks, I can search another way -- I can ask! People are the real search engines and knowlege walkers. Each person has a mental model that they use to find things. Words and text that can augment that model (hopefully in 'good' not 'evil' ways) will be the future of advertising.
Lawrence - nice nice response. certainly this is the posture and something to be noticed and taken into consideration when using this technique.
Oh, the "shift" "3" comment to get hash mark -- i couldn't agree more. in keeping with Lawrence's words - it's causing some bad posture and pressure! If we wanted this much hash, we'd revisit Woodstock.
Hopefully, the brain trust can come up with something more practical than hashtags for helping track trends and such.
I'm getting a bit tired of hitting the "Shift" and "3" keys again and again and again when there is a propper noun just so my social ramblings can get picked up by a bot that's going to dupe me into following them or pitch me something on Facebook. Gahhhh
Could you please define search advertising? I think I understand, but maybe not. As some parts of your post are confusing me. Are you referring to ads that relate to search key words and show up in the search results? Does it also refer to ads that are aligned with the subject of a Web page as well?
Also, how do you see this working in social network applications?
Adwords is for people leaning forward. It delivers information. They know what they want, they are looking for it. Nice, if your product is the lowest price commodity device/insurance/whatever. Poll leaning forward are not responsive to persuasion.
Social networks are for people leaning back. People leaning back can be persuaded they need something. To the extent a product is sold to disposable income, social is the place to be.
Adwords are great for marketers -- especially those who know how to research play with data like myself -- because it provides measurable feedback on your advertising.
Google Adwords makes it very easy to advertise on your site using their system, and their system does all the work for you. It's a great product, but like anything in marketing, once people discover something works, they flood the market and you're right back to square one with breaking through the clutter.
Social adwords -- if done right -- will be the next step for the same reasons. With a huge populace of users, all that is needed is a system that is quick, easy and unobtrusive for everyone to use and it will be the next spot marketing moves to in order to break through the clutter.
However, as long this sort of 'marketing osmosis' occurs there will always be a constant search for a less cluttered zone. Social adwords will eventually become cluttered, and we'll be moving on to the next big thing.
I think the next big thing beyond social marketing will be reputation marketing. It will be similar to social marketing, but reputation marketing occurs when people with space to sell say "No" to everyone but a handful of companies they actually like. Missing out on short-term gains for any ad dollars for the long-term gain of respectful ad dollars. By filtering out garbage ads out of respect for their audiences, these people will actually transfer their own respectability to the ads that do make it through.
Or another way to put the next big thing: No more garbage.
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In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M.
The smartphone market reached a significant milestone, a breakthrough that may cause vendors to celebrate but could strain the capabilities of IT service desks.
In the fall of 2011, around 160,000 students in 190 countries enrolled in a Stanford-sponsored online course about artificial intelligence. About 23,000 completed the course and got certificates, including 248 who got a perfect score. The university offered the same course the old-fashioned way to students sitting in Stanford classrooms. None of the those students got a perfect score.
As Mitch Wagner discussed today, Yahoo is acquiring Tumblr. The big Internet debate at the moment is whether Tumblr will be good or bad for Yahoo. Regardless of their stances on the future of Yahoo itself, many claim that Yahoo will somehow ruin Tumblr.
New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority is conducting a pilot test of digital kiosks to guide subway users to where they want to go more efficiently and at lower cost.
The whole Amazon.reader debate is a double-stupid. It's stupid to think that there's any e-book buyer who doesn't know Amazon's URL, and it was stupider to let ICANN launch the whole free-form TLD initiative to start with.
While NFC's original goal was to enhance mobile commerce applications, it is finding its way into a number of other uses, which is creating both opportunity as well as challenges for IT departments.
Enterprises would like to move to cloud computing but are hesitant because they are concerned about providers’ ability to secure company data. Here are some tips that help to ensure that if breaches occur, the business is not left holding the bag.
Edmunds separates customers into segments based on the info it collects on its site and from partners, and uses that to push out custom content, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
The automotive website uses propensity modeling to target ads and customer registration forms, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
Ushering in a new era of cognitive computing systems, IBM announced today the IBM Watson Engagement Advisor, a technology breakthrough that allows brands to crunch big data in record time to transform the way they engage clients in key functions such as customer service, marketing, and sales.
Expert Integrated Systems: Changing the Experience & Economics of IT In this e-book, we take an in-depth look at these expert integrated systems -- what they are, how they work, and how they have the potential to help CIOs achieve dramatic savings while restoring IT's role as business innovator. READ THIS eBOOK
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M2M: Rise of the Machines? Not Yet David Weldon In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M. CLICK FOR MORE
M2M: Rise of the Machines? Not Yet David Weldon In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M. CLICK FOR MORE
M2M: Rise of the Machines? Not Yet David Weldon In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M. CLICK FOR MORE
M2M: Rise of the Machines? Not Yet David Weldon In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M. CLICK FOR MORE
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