SEARCH AGENCIES

Sector overview

Despite the economic uncertainty over the last 12 months, the search industry has thrived. The sector has repeatedly performed best against traditional channels in the IPA's quarterly Bellwether report, with marketers revising budgets upwards by 11.5% in January's release.

For agencies, it was the first full year to cope without Google's Best Practice Funding. This had often been used by agencies to lure in new business by offering any commission from Google to the client directly. In a world without this, agencies had to prove their added value.

But valued they continue to be. Marketing giant LBi's deal with Bigmouthmedia creates one of the largest independent, digitally focused agencies, and shows how important search is to the wider market. Indeed, IPA Digital, which now has its search chairmanship filled by Golley Slater Digital's Mark Fagan, continued to focus on the sector. Earlier this year it launched the UK's first search qualification for agencies to encourage consistent training and development and drive growth across the multi-million pound sector (nma 18 February 2010). There are still plenty of brands that have yet to truly invest in search, so the IPA is looking at being the organisation to help them in.

It follows moves by the search engines to introduce accreditation schemes. In September 2009, Yahoo launched a search certification programme to help brands connect with specialist agencies. This followed Google's Conversion Programme in July, a UK accreditation scheme for website conversion specialists to help advertisers find the best in what is becoming an increasingly competitive sector.

From the platform perspective, the year's biggest story was Microsoft and Yahoo's search deal (nma.co.uk 29 July 2009), which has now been approved by regulators. The ten-year deal will see Yahoo's search powered by Microsoft's fledgling brand Bing, while a combined sales team will pool their resources to take on Google.

Bing launched in the US in June 2009 with image, mapping, shopping and travel interfaces as its USP, but the rest of the world had a slimmed down offering until the end of the year. It has only just kicked off its UK ad campaign in earnest. But Microsoft continues to be committed to search. Indeed, it sponsored a white paper released by the IAB on the relationship between search and social media.

That relationship is evident from the number of search agencies which now position themselves as social media experts too. This has been a reaction to various factors. For one, natural search and social media content go hand in hand, and finding new ways to appear above the fold is always attractive, whatever the sector. But the integration of Twitter and Facebook within Google and Bing results at the turn of the year has reinforced the link. Likewise, the number of combined search and social media pitches are on the rise.

And the pace of innovation shows no sign of letting up. Google Labs launched 25 tools in beta last year, from Google Squared, which tabulates facts from the web, to Google Goggles, which can search for content based on camera-phone photos. These tools mean search continues to be the first port of call on the web. Until that changes, specialist agencies' importance won't wane.

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