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Ed Stevenson, MD EMEA & APAC, Marin Software
A few years ago, a search marketer's life was relatively straightforward. They would buy traffic from a search engine and direct it towards a website, where the visitor would transact. Life was simple and it was generating great returns for advertisers.
Welcome to 2011. Thanks to the proliferation of mobile, tablet and social users, advertisers are now delivering content on more platforms, in more formats and accounting for more contexts than ever before. Advertisers now have to go beyond just investing in a website, and extend marketing investments across mobile applications, Facebook pages and Twitter feeds, with users increasingly converting off site, whether via mobile, local or social applications.
This fragmentation of platforms exists for search marketers as well. Search marketing campaigns have to be tailored to the requirements of specific platforms. For example, mobile search is predicted to be worth more than £5bn by 2015. Consequently, smart search marketers are already building out separate mobile campaigns by focusing on optimising budgets for the reduced number of positions in mobile SERPs, ensuring landing pages display across mobile devices, inserting phone numbers in creative and geo-targeting campaigns. All of this is increasing the complexity for search marketers without necessarily increasing revenues. As this shift occurs, early adopters will benefit from building a multi-channel customer base at a time when acquisition costs are still relatively low on these fast-growing platforms.
Platform expansion isn't the only challenge for search marketers. Their skills are also needed in the performance display market. Search marketers' knowledge in cost-per-click (CPC) advertising and granular targeting are well suited to the biddable display market. With the surge in spend on CPC Facebook advertising last year, the growth in the Google Display Network, as well as the likely advent of CPC display advertising on Twitter in 2011, this marketplace is growing fast, with Google and Facebook predicted by eMarketer to own more than 40% of display revenues by 2012. Search marketers need to take their skills in CPC biddable media marketplaces and combine them with display marketers' experience of interruptive advertising to create the perfect skillset for a new world of performance-driven display advertising.
To further add to the complexities for search marketers, remarketing is coming of age. The question has so far been what the value is of re-acquiring someone. This question is being answered as remarketing integrates with search, through integrations like the one between Criteo and Marin. This integration allows marketers to calculate a true cost of acquisition across search and remarketing.
All in all, life is getting interesting in the search world again. Search marketers will struggle to deal with the increasing complexity on their own and will need the support of technology to deliver insight across new channels and devices in order to have the visibility and control they need. They will also need to take knowledge from the display world to fill their skill gaps.