Presenter:

Carrie Coffee, Sales Executive, MEDIO Systems

There are three times as many mobile handsets as PCs. There are twice as many mobile subscribers as Internet users.

75% of mobile Internet users are searching.

Getting started as an advertiser

• Targeting—on- and off-deck, demographic info.
• Pricing model—CPM, CPC, CPA
• Appropriate CTA in mobile (no mobile site needed, but you can’t just take online to mobile)
• Set realistic expectations with respect to volume, targeting, tracking

Notes for mobile site owners

• Seek a search solution optimized for mobile Internet
• Submit your site to mobile indices to drive organic traffic. (Medio provides white label search to Verizon and (I think) AT&T as well as mobile site-specific searches (ABC, NBC). You can submit your site to Medio, for example.)
• Use other media to drive traffic to your mobile site—product packaging, TV, newspaper, outdoor, etc.

Medio’s search ads operate similarly to traditional search advertising—based around purchasing keywords. Have analytics and data on what mobile users are searching for. CPC bid model (many keywords in the 10-35 cent range). Primarily they do one search ad listing a page. (Medio has case studies on successful campaigns.)

Mobile search behavior—searching for games, ringtones, wall papers, weather, maps/local.

Medio also runs a display ad network on a CPL (cost-per-lead) basis.

Comments

Moderator: Bill Flitter, VP, Marketing, Founder, Pheedo

• Steven Marder, CEO, Eurekster
• Ben Pashman, VP Business Development, Gigya

Bill Flitter

RSS, new media, blogging, social media. That’s what Pheedo does. We help publishers analyze and use dist content. Thinking re: results

round and round widgets—’widgets’ used to be a generic term, but now it has a meaning

Brainstorming what we, the audience, want to know—we design the session.

• What makes a great widget? What makes people want it?
• What are popular widgets today?
• Is the microsite dead?
• Why do I need widgets?
• Is it worth creating these? Can we monetize widgets (specifically Facebook)?
• Examples of bad widgets—best practices
• How can widgets impact search?
• Can you measure conversions on widgets?
• Challenges in production?
• Legal concerns of widgets

Ben Pashman

Simple to complex widgets

Why is there so much attention focused on widgets? Social network advertising will grow a lot. Doesn’t interrupt user experience, not forcefeeding a branded message while they’re trying to talk to their friends. It’s the answer to how to get social media advertising

“If social network marketing delivers on its promise of peer recommendations the flow of ad dollars will turn into a flood”—eMarketer

The definition of widgets: widgets are miniapps that can be deployed on top of existing communities like Facebook. His simpler definition: any little piece of content that can be grabbed and shared, goes from one place to another—the atomized web. Even YouTube, embedding video. Shared, grabbed, personalized, utilized.

3 types of widgets

• desktop
• start page
• social media (the narrower definition)—big opportunity here. Dave Berkowitz broke down differences between these types of widgets in his blog. Goals: entertain friends, identify themselves, engage people, have fun, enable communications. Sets it apart from other categories.

It’s all just starting—we’re in the ca. 1995 era here. We’re seeing a lot of viral players, repackaging of content, and that works to some extent, but it doesn’t leverage the full potential.

Nike—what could they do?

Personal: Johnny, 16 y/o, likes movies and bball. Nike offers widget customizable to fave athlete/team. Highlight footage in widgets, send customized messages, live chats

Widget analytics:

• installs by location
• impressions
• interactions
• lifecycle (how long is it living on the page/pageviews over time)
• viral distribution patters

You can think of a widget as a mini browser. It’s a 24 hour TV channel that you can put anything in any time.

It’s primarily branding tool. Can drive some traffic to site, but primarily provides exposure for your site away from you site. Provides user-endorsed exposure. Can be viral. If your brand can be part of an individual’s self-expression, that’s a lofty goal.

Steven Marder

What’s great about widgets is the distribution opportunity. We’re about branded, distributed, social search. It’s about brands, distribution, engaging consumers with widgets. Leveraging search as a behavior, users’ desire/comfort with search while they’re on your page. We’ve been around 3+ years. But we’re not about building a destination or attract consumers—working with publishers.

Search + wiki = swickis

Trends in social media/social search

Then: media 1.0 centralized creation, traditional distribution, one-to-many. Search 1.0 algorithmic organization & creation (increasing dissatisfaction of generic search) one-to-many.

Now: media 2.0: navigation and discovery through connection and engagement. Discovery is just a huge element here, huge value prop for widgets and social media in general. Many-to-many

It’s about understanding your consumer, reinforcing brand, driving action. Leveraging social media tools, being part of the conversation, being authentic, being transparent. How do you engage in a conversation? Being fun, useful, authoritative, providing links to other people, providing value.

What do you have that you can leverage?

The power of your brand, the power of community, user participation and engagement, social media tools. Provide useful tools, apps, etc. to let them interact with your brand (content, products, genre). Leveraging social search is one such tactic.

We think social search is the next phase, and Google gets that—personalization to influence SERPs. It’s all about search behavior off general destinations.

Ex: search box with tag cloud widget. It’s a search tool for the site, but also a discovery tool.

Demo of building widget with Eurekster. Now you can build a site-specific search, brand it, skin it, and let people put it on their sites.

Steven: Fantastic opportunity to get in with kids early.

Q&A

Are there affiliate type widgets?

Ben: There are some available—Amazon, eBay, Widget Bucks. Natural extension for sure.

Steven: Be authentic. Build your brand.

Comment: Dell just did a campaign where people could contribute to a campaign to let people contribute to help their friends buy new computers—via widget and Paypal.

Biggest take home tip?

Ben: Keep it simple. Don’t try to cram your whole website on there.

Steven: Get compelling, engaging content on that widget.

Ben: Think about how can you add to the experience of the target display website. Fun, simple, silly are doing great volume.

Ben: Clearly the microsite is dead. Why would someone want to go to the BourneIdentity.com when they could take it with them? Don’t work so hard on creating a site to then create a community—leverage an existing community.

I built a Google Gadget. It got clicks but no sales. Can I reuse it? What do I do?

Ben: That’s a very common experience. You can’t just “build it and they will come.” Distribute it, promote it, but it’s not an easy thing. You can’t just build it and drop it in a widget gallery. (Though that can happen.)

[Note from my discussion with Tameka Kee of MediaPost: Think about why your target audience would want that widget on their site, not what you want to push out onto them.]

Steven: It’s not just a marketing tool. It’s softer. It’s branding.

Ben: It’s not just repurposing an ad.

Comments

Moderator: Maura Lewis, Director, Measurement Planning & Analytics, Grey San Francisco

• Kelly Graziadei, Sr. Agency Development Director, Yahoo
• Dave Honig, VP of Media Services, Didit
• Mike Jarvinen, Director, Search Marketing, The Search Agency

Increasingly search is expanding into other channels. Search overlaps more and more things.

Maura Lewis

Integration. For many of the marketers here today and many agencies, we find ourselves in almost an intractable situation. We seem to have at least some level of integration on the strategic level. People are beginning to understand that search is a great medium that can provide us with unique information. The knowledge that you gain from search can serve to drive some of the other channels—wording, the message to the audience, etc.

Still on tactical level, it’s almost impossible to integrate search and display and emerging media and offline media, whatever that may be.

I think that we’re still getting there, but we’ll still always face this challenge. Hopefully this panel will shed some light on how we as an industry can come together better to grow the pie in a holistic way, and how we can work toward that on a day-to-day level.

David Honig

What I’m seeing: I’m a media guy for the past 10 years—DoubleClick, Conducive Ad marketplace, Didit. Didit was previously purely search; clients wanted to integrate media campaigns. We saw the silos begin to break down about two years ago.

What I’ve been seeing. Last 6 months—to clients: you need to do other things to grow your company outside of search. You can’t be so one-dimensional. The fact of the matter is that Google is investing a lot of money in platforms outside of search. Because they see that there’s not so much growth outside of the queries. Google sees that image ads manufacture queries.

8 months ago we really started to push media buying with my team. One of the things we’re doing effectively is buying specific content: looking for what the advertisers are looking at. You have to bite the bullet and take a risk. We’re seeing an ROI, but not nearly as much as search. The click rates are abysmal on the search side.

But we’ve started tracking the users with cookies. With some of our campaigns, we’ve seen up to 70 (30?) % lift while running media campaigns; up to 24 hour latency pd.

We have to really find these users outside of search and drive them back. We’ve been tracking feverishly when our advertisers have bought MSN or Yahoo front page—seeing extreme growth of queries when that happens. We look at the competitive landscape and we track very carefully to be prepared.

Looking at DNA of the users. So many different algorithms for behavior—we just don’t understand behavior. The one thing I see for value for search marketers—observe platform data within their network and see that they’re doing and understand what they’re doing online. Look at their DNA, subset DNA and comp. DNA of people not going to our clients’ sites.

Retargeting has always been successful—50% of our clients are retargeting. WEelook at 8-10 segments of our clients’ sites and using exchanges to buy media. Clients were initially against not knowing what sites they’d be targeted to.

Advertisers know the importance of following their users. We’ve been seeing a lot of adaption within the retargeting.

Segmentation, retargeting.

Kelly Graziadei

Part of what I see driving the importance of search—consumer behavior. People used to engage with a brand by worshipping TV. Today people are still engaging with brands, but we’re in a multichannel (at a time) consumption world. We need to embrace that and not jump around, but not focus on just one medium.

With that, it becomes our responsibility to understand that. As search practitioners we can lead the way to communicating that. We can help drive the conversations understanding that interplay with search and other media on and offline.

Magazine ads—47%; articles—44%; TV ads 43%; newspaper ads 42%—motivated to conduct a search after seeing that (BIGresearch’s Simultaneous Media Survey)

We need to think about this as we plan—break down silos. We need to understand what else is going on on our media campaigns.

Yahoo—close the loop study to quantify impact of search and display. In 5 verticals, saw lifts on search and display

lift in share of pages view 68%
lift in share of time spent 66%
lift in offline sale 89%
life in online sales 249%

Retail space—offline revenue lift vs. control group
90% life in search & display. (43 + 15 isn’t 90) $511M
15% display only. Delta $157M
43% search only delta $108M
Reach of display + relevance(?) of search = power

As search practitioners, I think we also need to look at the value of a searcher as the target audience, and what happens as they engage with the site. We’ve really begun to understand that they’re not only looking to be influenced, but they’re more likely to influence others. We need to enable that activity, give them a platform—post online reviews, join a group, post comments—social media. The whole consumer experience is incredibly powerful.

One example: Hellman’s (and bring out the best!)

Hellman’s wanted to change the dialogue around “real food” and elevate their own brand perception. Put CTA on jar lids, TV spots, print ads: go to Yahoo! And search for REAL FOOD.

Searches on [Real Food] inc. 8223% vs. 6 months before campaign. Had a unique branded experience with Hellman’s Real Food logo (also, a yahoo shortcut).
Also saw Hellman’s searches increase ~50%. Think about other terms when doing that type of campaign.

Also created some unique content—Dave Lieberman of Food Network traveled the country filming Real Food Spots

Social Media: Y! Social Media tools—904 people joined group in the first month.

Users could submit their own Real Food stories online.

Mike Jarvinen

Are we getting pushed into display as an SEM? Yes by our clients—because we have a performance basis for it.

What are our goals when we present display:
Increase the nonbrand (unknown brands) content side where we can get more interaction where people are going in their daily lives in the Internet to drive them back through queries.
Own brand space

What could happen with display? What if we could just do something small? Such as moving just 4% of cost in a nonbrand contextual buy; couple pctg pts in brand content (just rebalancing the search budget). This decreases the CPA, increase conversions—20-25% increase in conversions; 16 to 20% decrease in CPA.

Understanding of the search engines on brand side. Understanding momentum and quality score. In the content network, it takes longer for us to gain momentum. On the performance side there are some of those same challenges. We’re doing full time ad testing, and they want to see that in display. But there’s a lot of other challenges in display—takes longer to work up creative, etc.

Change from brand creative to performance creative.

Display creative metrics—3 month campaign
2006: CTR 0.37%, Conversion rate 0.12%, CPA $77.40
2007: CTR 0.23%, Conversion rate 0.90%, CPA $36.10—prequalified clicks.

Strategic focuses for TSA in 2008:
Further content campaign optimization
gadget/widget ads
feed-based ad opps
Aggressively grow display: more clients, more distribution, more best practices.

LPs: get the person what they want ASAP so they can interact with it, get what they want.

Yahoo SmartAds or the next product.

Questions

For Dave & Kelly—one of the things we’ve come across: clients being hesitant to allocate pure display dollars because they say our company is purely an SEM.

Kelly: I don’t see a macro trend; it’s hit-or-miss. We do see those pureplay SEMS broadening their skill set and offerings. The challenges seem to be around creative development. But I think that SEMs are very well positioned for a performance-based world. Where you’ll need to make your clients feel more comfortable is around that creative development: outsourcing?

Dave: Last year, I would have said as a whole, yes. This past year, we’ve started to see a lot more allocated to display for us without affecting clients’ search budgets. If everybody just really can see the value to media, and driving to the search and the value of search queries increasing, it’s just natural. One-dimensional SEM companies won’t be around in a couple years. All of us follow the lead of Yahoo and Microsoft of offering these image ads. We’re hiring really good people to compliment our search teams in creative.

Followup from Maura: do you think that there will be a mass consolidation or do you think that there will be a coexistence of traditional SEM agencies who have morphed into something new? Or will they start blending together without differentiation?

Dave: You have to understand your core competency. But we understand that they’re asking for more. We might contract out, but we’re going to specialize in what our clients feel is important. We’re never gonna forget that our core competency is search.

Kelly: I think we’ve already seen some consolidation. Now we’re trying to find our way to find the best model—specialist SEM arm, further integration for better planning, individuals devoted to planning. From a nuance perspective, you do still need a specialty.

Last night we were talking about how display can lift search performance. Kelly, have you provided some case studies on this before?

Kelly: Yes. And we’ve looked at it on the macro level. I’m hoping what we can drive is that as an industry we can have and need to have a better measurement model.

Mike: It’s a challenge, measuring interaction between different media. But we’re trying to measure and adjust to measure lift. The more we can measure that as an industry, the more value we can show we provide in the long term.

A lot of discussion on how to get everything together, sharing budgets. We get a lot of “We don’t want to do our search with a big agency because it’s expensive.” What we’ve found is that because we have all these other groups consolidated, we can bring the data together and model it and package up for the client to show them. Sometimes Yahoo and Google don’t get conversion data—hard to close that loop. How does someone from Yahoo work on capturing conversion data and look at other media?

Kelly: Partnerships with agencies and clients to get comfortable in sharing conversion data for modeling and data insight.

Comments

Moderator: Matt Kain, SVP, Business Development, 24/7 Real Media

• Marcelo Sant’Iago, Director of Business Development, MídiaClick Brazil
• Lawrence Herman, VP of Business Development and Sales, Miva

Matt Kain

The first of the challenges in a global campaign is how to mobilize your own resources. You may have limited choice in that; if you’re a US-based company, you need a different set of services than someone in many countries.

Lawrence Herman

We pick and choose our business—we don’t try to be all things to all people. Our major advertisers want to get local customers in the UK, and likewise, people in France and Britain looking for US vacations, it’s good to have that geo-routed to the US.

The value of local market expertise and local language experience—a lot of people consider Latin America as one language and one culture

Marcelo Sant’Iago: that’s the biggest misperception. Brazil, the largest country—the Spanish-speaking audience of Latin America online is smaller than the Brazilian online audience. Search platforms give you complete control to run international campaign. Brazil, Russia, India, China, Korea—most don’t speak English. It’s a challenge to deal with local culture and local languages. In Brazil we have three different words for a tangerine, depending on the region. If you go to Spain—Barcelona—Catalan.

Lawrence: I think that he’s very correct (Catalan is right on). Google and Yahoo have virtually 0% penetration in Korea because the structure of the language is entirely different. People say things to create a feeling in others, not to make a point. Also, the logic structure is completely different: in Korean, start with the most obscure irrelevant point to come to the thesis at the very end. Keyword density might not be there—not a great factor for algorithmic search. They’re dominated by a human-powered search. This really requires a lot of human intervention to make it work. Ultimately you’ve got to be handed off to locals who can make it work.

Marcelo: A lot of US agencies are using us to localize their ads for Brazil. English-language ads don’t fly there; but some words aren’t translated (spyware is spywares in Brazil). Deal with local ideosyncrasies. It’s not just keyword translation.

You have to localize, but you also have to leverage. What do you say to clients who say that they want to set one campaign for all Spanish speakers?
Marcelo: Why not; it’s not hard to divide up the campaigns. There’s no inventory available in some places.

You can geotarget based on location, OS in another language (esp asian language).

Marcelo: For example, Google doesn’t have local search in Brazil. You can look at [exonyms/endonyms]. In one country, it’s a local ISP that’s #2 after Google. In most of the world adCenter isn’t available. In Latin America, MSN is still part of the Yahoo network. [You really have to look at the local markets—lots of partnerships, different models in different markets.]

Matt: Once you’ve overcome the issues of language, management, currency, speak with someone at individual engines/sites, and understand how those sites work. #1 in Korea is Naver.com: the SERP can be 3, 4, 5 scroll pages deep: several different indices, several different ad programs. Very much human edited.

Lawrence: The nature of what you’re getting stems from the difficulty of algorithmic search in the Korean language. Getting placement here is a completely different calculus than in the US.

Lawrence: Mobile phones as payment options: has resulted in different way of running mobile search, pushing local coupons directly to phones.

Marcelo: And that’s a good point, that there are a lot of different ways to push your content beyond keywords. Social media: Facebook and MySpace in the US, Bebo in UK, Orkut in Brazil—if you’re going to do social, it has to be done locally.

Matt: Advantages to having lots of different partners around the world: they have established relationships within their markets—a contact at Google, etc. If you’re going to operate in lots of different markets, you have to support all those different engines/APIs/platforms, etc. And then you have to have it report on lots of different charsets.

Another advantage (when the US$ is strong): with a local agency, your account can be in local currency, which can have a lower incremental bid, relatively smaller than a US$-based account.

Marcelo: There aren’t any real global search agencies; still partnering and acquiring to get that reach.

Lawrence: It’s not just a matter of linguistics: the nature of ads are very different. US/UK: price competitiveness. Based on CTR, quality is more important in Germany. That creative has to be localized to cater to linguistics and sensitivities.

Comments

• David Berkowitz, Director of Emerging Media & Client Strategy, 360i
• Aaron Goldman, Director of Client Strategy & Development, Resolution Media
• Bob Heyman, Chief Search Officer, Mediasmith
• Gord Hotchkiss, CEO & President, Enquiro

Will there be a Google killer?

Aaron: In the short term, I don’t see that happening. Can someone cobble together assets that they already have? Can somebody potentially put together the pieces to put together the next wave of web monetization? I think so. I don’t see anybody taking away from Google’s core business. But I see Facebook, if they can get their act together, doing that.

Gord: As long as Google stays good at its core, I don’t see that. But we’re breaking down the silos. Search is going to change in its function as the web becomes richer. But I think it’s misleading to think that search as we know it now will be the same for a long time.

David: Looking at MySpace with twice the traffic of Ask; YouTube search rivals some search properties’ traffic. With Hakia—I can’t figure out how to use it (and he’s spent a fair amount of time with new search engines). Powerset & Powerlabs—they do their own search of Wikipedia—I could barely tell the difference. To be better than Google at search, you have to be SO much better. Google could just be okay with search for a while and people will still keep using it.

Bob: I predict that anything that gets labeled a Google killer or an iPod killer won’t kill anything. In video, Google search doesn’t really have a cross-platform search.

David: YouTube doesn’t want us to think of them as a search.

Greg: I see it moving more and more to a mobile platform. I was talking to Max Kalvinov (sp?): the incumbency effect. For something to bump us out of our rut, it has to be a quantum leap better.

David: Look at the number of people still on Hotmail: people’s habits are ingrained (also convenience of not porting data). People will stick with something inferior for a long time.

I was kicked off Google for too much search volume (they thought he must be a bot), so he went to Ask. There are lots of other ways that they can kill their marketshare.

Gord: Looking at Ask—they don’t want to be a Google killer, they have some relevancy issues, but they’re good for alternate search.

Ideas to take advantage of Wikipedia. A year ago, I used to go in there as an SEO/SEM to maintain links, but now nofollowed, I passed that to the PR team.

Aaron: It’s a different lens, but they’re still value. Having a presence, having your company in there, as long as you’re represented. Build up your own involvement in Wikipedia, have your own authority. I look at it as this whole notion of ceding control. Being there in Wikipedia is a second chance at the top 10.

David: We do a lot of work with Comedy Central—Stephen Colbert tries to mess with Wikipedia, and that drives traffic to CC site, Wikipedia gets traffic. Also interesting when other companies try to tap into the Wiki model: Amapedia.

Will SEMs ever ‘get’ display? Will you be able to work with it?

Gord: I think we already are. We’re all looking at integrating display. Because we do a lot of usability testing with different forms of engagement—the assumption marketers make is the more ‘bandwidth’ the more effective—I’m not so sure that’s the case. I’m not so sure that when we’re looking for information on a search page and we’re starting to see universal results come into that, I don’t know how they react to that. We’ve seen test ads kick as far as performance goes across a lot of channels.

Aaron: I see too many firms jumping into display just to grow their revenue. It’s just going to cause clutter.

Bob: We think search is a medium that should be planned with display and interactive.

Aaron: I think it’s interesting that it’s led by search. I’d like to see that happen with larger holding companies as they acquire more SEMs.

Will we get to a point where people will enter personally identifiable information directly on the SERP (auto insurance)?

Gord: Search is about satisificing: quickly narrowing down to 4-5 brands to consider. Start building your consideration set, often with a generic search. Unless it’s a totally commoditized product (ie it doesn’t matter where you get it from).

How is the global market impacting your businesses? Effectiveness across campaigns, esp. where search engine marketshare doesn’t mirror US’s.

Aaron: Makes it a lot harder for us. Depending on the space there’s a lot of differences in savviness. The biggest challenge is who leads that process. If US-led, have people on the ground in the important regions. Standardization is the biggest challenge. It’s a whole different set of realities that you have to plan against. More often than not, it is led here in the US, because we lead SEM.

Bob: Google dominates more outside the US than in—but in China, you can’t buy into Baidu unless you speak Mandarin and have someone in China, basically.

Gord: When you talk to Chinese users, they’re using Baidu for different purposes. Baidu is great for MP3 downloads. Looking for facts, go to Google. To get those nuances, you have to be on the ground and understand where you need to get your buy.

Bob: Don’t underestimate the language challenges, too. Note that in languages like Dutch/German: same words are twice as long, and you have the same character limits.

We’ve heard a lot that organic is 80% of the traffic, but paid search just dominates—everybody is just focused on paid search. What can we do to help get us away from paid search?

Aaron: Therapy. Paid search is the crack of SEM. We have to tell them that eventually they’ll burn out, but it’s great to see those instant results.

Bob: SEO is just too slow for some people. PPC gives you time to get your value proposition, etc., in.

Gord: The hard thing is that it’s tough to fight with the clients like that. There’s not nearly the mismatch of expectations in paid. I agree completely with you on the power of organic. We still do a a lot of organic optimization. But I have yet to have “the dream optimization” project. I would hate to see that advantage die because we’re tired of butting heads.

David: It’s so easy to define ‘media.’

Gord: From the pure business perspective, it’s not a great business. There’s a long learning curve, decreasing returns Unless you’re passionate about it as a practice, it’s not an attractive model.

David: Although PPC has its own challenges, too. The margins aren’t so that people are dying to get into it.

Gord: But aren’t we failing as an industry into Arron’s analogy. Yeah, it’s hard, it’s micromanaging, but relative to organic, it’s a walk in the park on a sunny day.

Point: I see SEO as a workaround. Telling the CEO that the site that he loves actually sucks isn’t fun (and doesn’t work). You have CEOs that have built up their experience from TV, they see text-based sites and say, “Huh?” You’re going in there changing the business models.

Gord: Example from yesterday’s site review. You’re going to have to make a decision. How important is organic visibility to you as a business decision? Are you going down this path?

Bob: Good design and good SEO are still antithetical.

How do you feel about paying to appear inorganic results (ie Yahoo shortcuts)?

Aaron: we’ll do it as long as they let us.

Bob: Yahoo wouldn’t sell it to us for a news aggregator because it works too well for news. Overall it’s yesterday’s product

Gord: It’s a weird anomaly in the space.

Paid versus organic. Is there a different clientèle in paid versus natural—do 80% of clicks = 80% sales, or does 20% of paid clicks = 50% of sales?

Gord: I personally think the 80/20 thing is because we’re not doing a good job of matching our messages to our customers. They’re in the wrong phase of the funnel. I think that’s why there’s disproportionate organic clicks, but as we match intent better, we’ll see those ratios drop.

Bob: I’d love to see % of clicks and conversions. Paid search is successful because you can link it back to conversions.

David: I’ll disagree with Gord here because I think marketers have come a long way with how they’re segmenting intent, etc. As the ads are generally very relevant to them, they’ll still get clicks, but people are training themselves not to look at advertising as much. There has been some research in the past for, say, retail queries get more clicks on ads.

Aaron: As we’re seeing the move toward universal search—the eye goes right to the image then sniffs around. As that happens more and more, that will get more eyeballs in the organic results. The biggest click factor is image ads in the SERPs could again change the clicking behavior.

Gord: Scanning behavior is going to change a lot as they change formats.

Comments