Pay per click (PPC) marketing is growing up fast it’s been ten years since the first PPC venture was launched by the now defunct GoTo.com. Whilst still fundamentally a straightforward bid-based advertising model, relentless growth over the last decade in the search marketing industry has created an enormous market for PPC, which in turn has demanded from marketers an increasingly intelligent and strategic approach to the way in which they utilise the medium.
The voracious desire of so many brands to inject money into PPC strategy shows little sign of slowing down either. According to recent estimates from eMarketer, paid search continues to make up the bulk of UK online advertising spend, with the amount of money being ploughed into it set to rise from £2085 million this year, to £2890 million by 2013.
In B2B, evidence suggests that investment in PPC marketing is as desirable as ever a recent study by search engine marketing company Enquiro showed that brand recall rose by 27 per cent when a B2B company was at the top of the sponsored results listings compared to being top of the organic results. We are seeing an increasing understanding by B2B marketers across all sectors that their customers and prospects are online and using search throughout the buying process, says Richard Robinson, industry head of B2B markets at Google. With this realisation B2B marketers are focusing greater effort and resources on taking advantage of paid search marketing.
An ever-changing landscape
As fast as B2B marketers are upping their game in the PPC stakes, so the nature of the model is constantly evolving meaning the brands that will gain the most out of the PPC model in the future are the ones who can adapt. With Google estimating that 25 per cent of the searches made each day are brand new search phrases, this is not a static environment, warns Pete Oxlade, group account director at CheezeDMG.
As a concept, PPC remains the same, however its implementation is constantly evolving, says Nicola Eaton, paid search manager at Further, Ads have grown from just text to include video, image and mobile formats. Google Adsense has been opened up to third party networks. Facebook has introduced paid search advertising, giving another avenue for targeting demographically. Adwords allows you to specify not only the network you appear on, but also the type of device. Change is still happening, and I believe will continue to happen as the nature of the internet itself evolves.
PPC versus SEO
Despite all of these tangible changes, one of the biggest shifts in the very nature of PPC activity lies in people’s perception of it versus its ‘sister’ search tool, search engine optimisation (SEO). Successful SEO implementation has long been considered a ‘dark art’, whereas PPC has often been dismissed as a relatively easy task to master you bid on keywords and the results are pretty much instant.
There has been much debate over recent years regarding the merits of PPC versus SEO pitching the two against each other as if the savvy marketer is best off choosing which one to invest their time in. But as PPC becomes increasingly sophisticated and complex, these perceptions are changing. PPC has become more similar to SEO, with landing page optimisation being an important part of that, explains Lisa Myers, director of Verve Search. It’s not just about bidding for keywords anymore, it’s about optimising your account.
Indeed Google’s quality scoring system whereby its AdWords system uses a variety of metrics to constantly assess how relevant your keyword is to your ad text and a user’s search query has forced marketers to put as much groundwork into their PPC campaigns as they do their SEO.
Relevancy has become critical, says Richard Brown, senior search analyst at I Spy. The ongoing developments to quality score algorithms ensures advertisers are having to constantly improve their techniques to achieve a strong score. This has encouraged them to rethink the way they structure their campaigns, the ad copy they use and the landing pages they select.
An issue of trust
Interestingly, Google’s quality scoring system is likely teaching Internet users to place more trust in search listings a behavioural shift that is also beginning to impact the way PPC marketing is approached by brands. Ensuring visibility on page one of a search engine may soon become a preoccupation of the past. [People are] willing to research more thoroughly and consider companies ranked on page two and maybe beyond, points out Stephen Alexander, managing director of First Internet.
Furthermore (and most likely linked to the fact that in these cash strapped times, professionals are increasingly working longer hours to maintain trade) B2B brands are now finding that limiting the display of their ads not just to traditional office hours is having a desirable effect. Commercial currency service provider Corporate FX is one such brand (see box out). If you switch your ad off at weekends, and your competitors keep theirs switched on, that you could potentially lose a chunk of business, says PPC expert Anne Stanley.
On top of all of this, there have been two landmark decisions by Google within the past two years that have altered the PPC landscape. One, its May 2008 trademark lift, which effectively saw brands able to bid on their competitors keywords, and two, the scrapping of its Best Practice Funding (BPF) model in January of the same year.
This second decision could have ramifications as Microsoft and Yahoo’s combined new search offering, Bing, another big piece of news in search that could alter the nature of PPC marketing, establishes its place in the market. The termination of BPF saw Google stop paying percentage based bonuses to agencies whose clients spent money with Google on their PPC campaigns. Microsoft is still doing these agency schemes, says Myers. We could see agencies working hard to get their clients to spend their money with Microsoft.
No big bang for Bing
In the short term though, most believe that the launch of Bing will have little initial impact on Google’s monopoly of the search market. Bing is being talked about a great deal by PPC businesses, but its impact on the market is not yet discernable, says Justin Wanstall, founder of Interactive Red. It commands only around 10 per cent of the market, but is generally considered to be doing well, and expectations are that it will grow. It is going to take some drastic changes to overthrow Google’s dominance though.
More interesting in the short term is to look at how Google will react to this new competition. We’re not standing still, demonstrated through recent developments like Google Caffeine, a trial of a faster, more efficient search, says Robinson.
But it’s not just Bing that search experts predict might eventually topple Google. The rise in popularity of real time search as pioneered by social networking site Twitter is being marked up by many as a potential threat to the search engine goliath. Twitter’s search results are based on what people are talking about right now, it has a freshness and a speed to it that Google’s search results perhaps lack, says Martin Talks, CEO of Blue Barracuda. Twitter has surprised people too by being more B2B orientated than people first predicted a large chunk of its audience is made up of business professionals.
PPC is no longer an emerging marketing discipline this mantle has been passed on to social marketing, agrees Eaton. Could the future for both be a marriage of the two?
Case study: Corporate FX
Corporate FX needed an intelligent search strategy to generate new business enquiries and drive targeted traffic to its newly re-launched website. Its PPC campaigns, led by DBD Media, targeted finance directors to generate leads for its Forex brokers.
This involved identifying keywords relevant to the foreign exchange market, which were matched to relevant ad copy and landing pages. Website traffic, enquiries and transactions were tracked at keyword level, allowing Corporate FX to understand in detail what drives enquiries.
The campaign was initially set to run during office hours, but tests proved that extending this into the evening and weekends generated strong results – suggesting that finance directors search around the clock.
DBD Media also worked closely with Corporate FX’s web design company, providing search engine optimisation (SEO) consultancy for the launch of the new website. This ensured that the new website followed SEO best practice in terms of site architecture and coding, ensured the website content is closely aligned with keyword strategy, and produced a comprehensive link building strategy.
Three months in, the strategy is paying off and Corporate FX’s website is beginning to rank well for a range of target keywords.
