The Nine-Figure Difference Between “Search” and “Search Engines”

After five years of incredible growth from Google, Yahoo and Ask, it’s all too easy to think of search as a marketing venue. But before it was a multibillion-dollar industry, search was a verb, an action taken by people. Search is not synonymous with search engines. Search is a pervasive online activity. To truly engage consumers at the point of their expressed interest, marketers do well to think beyond their paid search campaigns.

Searching from the Browser “Hardware”
Search frequently happens via toolbars. DoubleClick Performics’ recent “Searcher Mom’s” research report, for example, found that 57% of women who search use toolbars as their primary search vehicle. For searchers, it’s the action – not the venue. With toolbars and built-in browser search boxes in Firefox and Safari, many searchers save themselves a step and search from any online destination.

Search also happens in the browser navigation bar. Many users seem to have a kind of blind trust that the Internet will magically deliver their informational needs. They type a generic keyword or brand into browser’s address bar as a URL – cheapflights.com, airlinetickets.com or bookaflight.com, for example – assuming that this will get them closer to the information or activity they seek.

The owners of those domains often deliver on this expectation by displaying search ads syndicated to them by Google and Yahoo. Some estimates claim 10% of all paid search campaign clicks originate through these domains and convert surprisingly well. Your search teams can analyze referral logs and Google’s ad placement reporting to determine how much of your traffic comes from this “direct nav” behavior.

While most paid search campaigns already tap this traffic source, many marketers could connect more directly with this search behavior by buying relevant domain names that receives significant direct navigation traffic. If a domain like printers.com or wifi.com receive 5,000 direct nav visits/month and those search clicks cost $2 each, a capital investment of $300K would be profitable in only 2.5 years. Besides locking in long term sources of traffic, these domains can also contribute to natural search efforts, providing valuable inbound links or hosting user generated content.

Social Media and Search
And speaking of user-generated content, top social networking sites have surpassed some search engines as search sites. According to comScore’s qSearch data for Sept 2007, YouTube received 1.2 billion queries, 100 million more than MSN Live Search; MySpace and eBay each received almost three times the 200 million queries of Ask.

Marketers should consider “user generated content” to be “user searched content,” asking what content can we offer in these social search venues? What do these searchers find when they search for the most important category or affinity keywords related to our products? When they search for our brand?

Social venues require a content and engagement strategy, leading to more questions. They can also improve natural search performance for marketers’ content and primary Web sites, but the searchers on those sites themselves are too often overlooked when marketers devise these strategies.

Adapting the SEM Skill Set to Social Networks
Marketers can rest assured that their search teams’ core paid search skill sets will come in very handy in managing campaigns on new social network ad platforms. Facebook, for example, allows advertisers to buy CPC clicks in a bid-based marketplace where ads feature a text headline and description. Though keyword targeted, these ads are not query based; they target based on user entered interests or activities. Launching, tracking, reporting, optimizing and scaling these campaigns will require the skill sets many search engine marketers (SEMs) apply daily as they manage search campaigns with hundreds of thousands of keywords. MySpace has also announced a similar CPC platform for release later this year.

Users search to find what they seek, and satisfying experiences reinforce their search behavior. The tools or sites that deliver and the brands or publishers that provide this information tend to get rewarded with their loyalty. But in order to capitalize on the opportunity, search teams must remember that marketing to searchers is more than marketing on search engines. Content, domain and social networking engagement strategies need to stand beside bid, keyword and copy strategies to engage searching consumers at their point of expressed interest and desire regardless of where that might be.

Cam Balzer is vice president of emerging media at DoubleClick Performics and a monthly contributor to Chief Marketer. Contact him at [email protected].