Almost all marketers over time realize search engine don't always have marketers best interests in mind. With the never ending fees being charged by the search engines to provide themselves and their shareholders huge profits, they often forget the needs of the advertiser / marketers themselves.
So what is a small marketer to do? Here's how to make the best of a bad situation.
Search is an online marketing powerhouse. First of all it’s a performance-driven medium whose built-in ability for accountability makes it popular with anyone who's interested in validating their advertising spending.
Now don't get me wrong, there's a lot to like about CPC models, however it also suffers from many inherent flaws that involve the marketers attempt to reach they're targeted market in the most affective manner.
The first flaw pertains to the conflicting missions of the search engines themselves. Search engines have three distinct constituencies they must serve:
1. Everyday people who use search engines and demand the best user experience. If the search engine manages to live up to expectation, everyday people will return time after time giving that search engine most of the traffic and consumer loyalty.
2. Marketers who compete against each other for the privilege of having their listings visible to users.
3. Finally, the search engines' themselves, executives and their shareholders whose interest is having the engines find more and more new ways to charge for their services as much as possible.
These competing elements often mean that "you the marketer" are often caught in the middle. While the search engines executives and shareholders appreciate the fact that listings are sold at auction, therefore extracting the maximum amount of money from the advertiser from every transaction.
Pitting marketers against each other for every click in that classic pitfall where if I win, you lose scenario. Although users might prefer that search engines speed them to their destinations without unnecessary exposure to commercial messages, executives and shareholders demand that such exposure be maximized for profits ache.
I have often had discussion with other marketers that search engines actually have a powerful disincentive against delivering users too quickly or too effectively to their destinations.
Let me give you an example, if a user searching for a brand such as "Home depot" was delivered instantly to the homedepot.com website without being exposed to other paper click listings paid for by Lowes (or competitors beating up on category keyword), a powerful money making opportunity would be lost for the search engines executives and their stockholders.
Yet Google last month rolled out a beta feature called Search Within Search, which adds an additional layer of results (and another opportunity for competitors to grab the attention of searchers) when a user makes a Search Within Search query. While shareholders might welcome such an innovation (because it expands saleable inventory) and users might like it too (because it's convenient), some marketers are already seeing red; several high-profile e-tailers, including Amazon.com, have opted out of Search Within Search, arguing that their site-based searches are superior to what Google offers and because they do not wish to expose searchers to additional traffic-stealing competitors.
These competing interests determine everything that happens in the paid search marketplace, and marketers often find themselves in a state of continual frustration whenever the engines unilaterally decide to provide a new service or algorithmic changes not to serve to make search easier for the user but just to increase profits. Consequently, it's quite understandable when they conclude that the interests in profits have been put ahead of users and marketers.
Unfortunately, there's no easy way to address this issue, because search marketers are a long way from realizing their own collective bargaining power. As a result, we often see marketers giving up on paid search entirely, either by reverting to an SEO-only strategy or leaving the search marketplace altogether.
We must start looking carefully at our own marketing campaigns to identify and carefully eliminate every possible inefficiency in our search campaign, identify and bid aggressively for the best audience segments, and be flexible enough to make extremely quick changes to our search engine campaigns to respond to changing features in the marketplace.
It's unlikely that search engines will begin behaving in a more advertiser-friendly manner anytime soon. So you as a marketers really only have one course open to you, and that's to bear the pain and to play as smart, efficient and aggressive game as you can.
Always remember, you must resist the natural tendency to be complacent once all of this hard work is done, because change is always just around the corner, and this change is likely to benefit the search engines and their stockholders in the form of profits not the user or advertiser.
In spite of the current marketplace there are ample opportunities for good marketers. Because today many marketers have recently begun the process of optimizing their search campaigns. I only know this because at Franklyn’s Bay we often take over accounts formerly run by major SEM agencies that are, to be blunt, in states of such horrible disrepair that they require a complete gut and rebuild process. The fact that so many marketers are running badly constructed campaigns means that there are real rewards ahead for those who manage to get it right.
