Most of us use search at some point in our working day. “Whether it’s to procure a new service or find a new supplier of office products. In short, the use of search marketing in B2B is essential,” says Gary Hawkins, board account director at advertising agency RLA Group. This is supported by research undertaken by agency Neutralize, where online marketing was revealed to account for 31 per cent of total marketing budgets.
On the whole, this has involved natural search and pay-per-click (PPC) or sponsored search using the right hand results column of the search engine results page. The survey reports that this accounts for 94 per cent of the search marketing budget. However, this is changing. Andrew Hood, MD at online marketing agency Lynchpin, says, “SEO is becoming more competitive and click costs are rising. This is causing marketers to look elsewhere and we are now witnessing the emergence and growth of some interesting new forms of search marketing. I expect these to grow rapidly in the next 12 months.”
There are many new methods. There is local search, where results are restricted to a specific location, mobile search which can be done from a mobile phone and image search where we search for images rather than words. Then there are newsfeeds, map searches, socio-economic searches and demographic searches. And so the list grows.
Paul Doleman, chief technical officer at search agency Spannerworks, says, “Google launched more than 27 search products in 2006. This isn’t evolution; it’s a revolution. Search is growing very fast. Mobile will be big next year and user-generated content and the fusion of algorithmic search with social search will not be too far behind. Search is becoming a universal glue touching all sorts of people via many distribution mechanisms.”
However, while these are undoubtedly areas to watch, B2B marketers are not really focused on them. For now, the only alternative form of search that B2B marketers are using to any great extent is contextual search. This little-understood and much-maligned form of search is finally starting to come into its own and is worthy of serious consideration by all B2B marketers.
Contextual search
Kenneth Lillie, head of corporate development at TBG, describes how contextual search works. “It scans the content of a web page and shows relevant advertising that relates to key terms within the content,” he explains. So you might be reading an article about employment law and see a link to the website of an employment lawyer. It may not be an article. It could be a product review, a news site, an email programme, a newsletter or a partnered site.
Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing and MSN AdCenter are among the most popular media for contextual search marketing. Miva is also a big player and is unique in that contextual search is its primary offering to advertisers. Alexis Sitaropoulous, head of marketing at Miva, says, “It costs from about 10p per click to advertise next to relevant content on our network and we recommend to advertisers that if they want to get full online coverage they advertise on our network as well as all the others.”
Return on investment
One benefit of contextual search is that it tends to be cheaper than sponsored search. Although generic terms can be expensive in sponsored search, contextually they can work out cheaper. However, some are sceptical about how effective contextual search can be. Grant Keller, director for EMEA at Acceleration, says, “It’s not as cost effective or delivers as much value as search marketing for advertisers, or any other form of direct marketing. It could be a great supplement to an online campaign, but as a standalone medium it is limited.”
Ed Stevenson, MD of 24/7 Real Media, goes further. He says, “Even though B2B marketers face a challenge to generate online traffic, I can’t see contextual search as the solution. Marketers have been experimenting with it, but have found it limited. It’s solely text-based and it involves interrupting someone when they’re looking at something else. A much better solution is to build a high quality website that will be relevant to your target audience and so will appear high in natural search listings.”
Not everyone is so sceptical about the potential of contextual search. Indeed, in many ways B2B marketing is ideally suited to contextual search. Business audiences tend to be more clearly defined than consumer audiences and so marketers can more easily identify specific websites on which to focus.
Hannah Kimuyu, media director at search marketing agency Greenlight, is an advocate. She says, “Contextual search has improved greatly over the last year. Google has reassessed its contextual network, improving its range of partners and allowing advertisers to pick which sites they advertise on in both text and image formats. It now also allows you to exclude sites.
“Yahoo has also improved its contextual network, securing partnerships with international news websites like CNN. Since its launch, MSN AdCenter has also started to develop its own contextual network with the intention of making it an integral part of its advertising programme. Finally, Miva’s own take on contextual search certainly makes it the most unique and in some verticals, the most commercially viable. At Greenlight we get good results from contextual search.”
B2B reticence
It is surprising then that contextual search in the B2B market has been dwarfed by natural search and PPC. Ross Barnes, head of search at new media agency Vizeum, offers this explanation. “Our B2B clients are using it but many are still not using it effectively or properly,” he says. “There is still a lot of work to be done to educate clients about how it works. They tend to see it as an extra sponsored search channel, but it’s a completely different beast to traditional keyword search.” He believes that initial high expectations and a lack of understanding have contributed to this reticence on the part of B2B marketers. He adds, “Many agencies were expecting a silver bullet with instant results extending the reach of their search campaigns. It didn’t happen. Because it’s different, results were poor. People didn’t know how to use it properly and concluded that it just doesn’t work.”
For Lillie however, there is a more fundamental problem. He says, “Because the owners of the websites where the ads appear earn money every time an ad is clicked on, there is temptation for the owner of a site to click on content-based ads. These don’t convert for the advertiser and so ruin the return on investment figures and this has led many advertisers to move away from content based advertising.” He adds however, that there are ways around this problem.
“We use advanced tracking methods to monitor fraud and we work with the search engines to provide our clients with fraudulent click refunds. Consequently, contextual search works very well for us.” Furthermore, online advertising contracts are gradually shifting away from PPC towards payment per sale. This will further reduce the possibility of fraud.
The world of B2B marketing is divided about contextual search. Some believe it is fundamentally flawed and will be eclipsed by natural search and PPC. Many are as optimistic as Doleman, who says, “We can expect to see enhanced accuracy as natural language processing techniques improve. In addition, search will be built into enterprise software and contextual search will be the de facto search technique by 2010.” The success of Fast Search & Transfer, an enterprise search platform, in rapidly gaining over 500 customers, would support this prediction that search will be built into enterprise software.
Most however accept the somewhat cautious conclusion of Keller. “Contextual advertising is still an evolving form of online marketing and I think it has some way to go before it will become a regular feature in advertisers’ online marketing programs. Anyone who does try it should bear this in mind and set realistic goals.”
