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Marketing on the Web
The business of selling search engine inclusions and placements is complex because
many search engines do not sell inclusion and placement rights on their pages directly to
advertisers. They use search engine placement brokers, which are companies that
aggregate inclusion and placement rights on multiple search engines and then sell those
combination packages to advertisers. Another reason for the complexity in this business is
that recent years have brought a flurry of mergers and acquisitions. For example, in 2003, 211
Yahoo! purchased Overture, a search engine placement broker. The most popular search
engine, Google, does not use a placement broker to sell search term inclusion and
placement for its site. Google sells these services directly through its Google AdWords
program.
Two excellent resources for keeping up with the rapid changes in this business are
Danny Sullivan’s two related Web sites, Search Engine Land and Marketing Land. These sites
include many free resources and explanations that are useful for learning about search
engines, placement brokers, online marketing, and search engine optimization in general.
Web sites that offer content can also participate in paid placement. Google offers its
AdSense program to sites that want to carry ads that match the content offered on the site.
Other companies offer similar ad brokerage services, but Google is the leader in this
market, reporting more than $12 billion in AdSense advertising revenue in 2013. The
content site receives a placement fee from the broker in exchange for the ad placement and
the broker sells the placement slots to interested advertisers. These techniques in which ads
are placed in proximity to related content are sometimes called contextual advertising.
Of course, this approach is not without its flaws. In 2003, the New York Post ran a
sensational story that described a gruesome murder. The murder victim’s body had been
cut into pieces, which the murderer hid in a suitcase. When the newspaper’s Web site ran
the story, it appeared with a paid placement ad for luggage. The ad broker’s software had
noted the word “suitcase” in the story and decided that it would be the perfect place for
a luggage ad. Today,
ad brokers use more sophisticated software and human reviewers to prevent this type of
error; however, some industry analysts believe that contextual advertising on content sites
will never be as successful as paid placement on search engine pages. They argue that
search engine pages are provided to site visitors looking for something specific, often as
part of a purchasing process. Content sites are used to explore and learn about more
general things. Thus, an ad on a search engine results page will always be more effective
than an ad on a content site page.
Another variation of paid placement ads uses search engine results pages that are
generated in response to a search for products or services in a specific geographical area.
This technique, called localized advertising, places ads related to the location on the
search results page. Localized advertising came about as a result of local search services.
In 2004, Google launched a local search service that lets users search by ZIP code or local
address. All of the other major search engine and Web directory sites followed Google’s
lead and now offer some form of localized search, either as part of their main search page
or as a separate service. The local advertising market is estimated to be more than $30
billion and is growing worldwide, especially as mobile devices become the primary target
for such advertising. You will learn more about localization and mobile commerce in
Chapter 6.
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