Today's ads on search engine results pages are by and large more effective than ever, without all the bells and whistles. So why change now?<BR>
While the web has been zipping ahead for years in terms of appearance, usability and appeal, at least one important internet element appears thoroughly stuck in the mud: advertising on search engine results pages (SERPs).
How many years have we been looking at the same static format? Yet according to GlobalSpec, today's ads in search engines -- without implementing any of the newest developments in online technology, including color, movement, graphics, and video -- are by and large more effective than ever.
GlobalSpec should know. It currently gets about 3 million users per month to search its site for technical and industrial information and is intensely involved on both sides of the search engines by buying ads on other sites to promote its own products and services, and selling ads to populate its own SERPs.
How can this be? And what are the prospects for further improving the ads in SERPs, increasing their effectiveness and helping them match the capabilities of other forms of online advertising?
One reason SERPs ads have become so effective without adding graphical bells and whistles is because the current crop of advertising is routinely selected and served to optimize such factors as location, demographics, prospect behavior and time of day, as well as nuances within the search terms, the prospect's inferred interests, and the context of the page's unpaid results. In addition, the extremely high volume of searches (and ads served in response to those searches) provides the basis for almost immediate, reliable research on individual ad effectiveness.
Advertisers that are flexible enough to respond quickly to the results of such research can change their text-based ads on SERPs almost in lockstep with their prospects' changing interests, preferences and approaches to using the internet.
A slower upgrade than expected
The shift toward more graphical advertising on SERPs -- a niche idea that arrived on the scene half a dozen years ago and which Google has reportedly been experimenting with for the last year -- has not spread nearly as quickly as many had thought.
One reason is simply that banners on SERPs, rather than being more attractive to most online prospects as they are in other contexts, often turn out to be at worst, irritating, and at best, ignored. Even more important may be that graphical ad campaigns generally require more hands-on service to sell and maintain and therefore threaten to upset the highly-profitable cost structure of highly-automated search engine machines like Google and Yahoo!
Another reason graphical advertising is not likely to dominate SERPs anytime soon is that they're simply not as cheap and easy to vary as text-based ads. For a variety of technological and organizational reasons, graphical advertising units are much less amenable to the iterative testing and optimization routinely used for text-based advertising.
In addition, the cost structure for graphical advertising -- from creative through execution -- is much higher than for text, so an advertiser would have more difficulty achieving satisfactory ROI after producing a full repertoire of graphical ads to serve with the same granularity on SERPs as today's text-based advertising.
The permutations and combinations of iterative advertising quickly add up. According to Sarabjit Singh, senior director of traffic and product development at GlobalSpec, the company assiduously studies and optimizes the ads it buys and sells, evaluating at least six variations on each of the three main elements of a text-based search engine ad: the title, the copy and the URL. That's 216 variations for a single advertisement. With text advertising, that's cheap and easy. With graphical advertising, testing a single campaign could conceivably break the whole budget.
The way of the future
According to Tig Tillinghast, CEO of Watershed Publishing, a B2B publishing company that owns MarketingVOX and other sites, the folks doing text ads are optimization-focused and are primed to keep trying variations on advertising.
"But there's frankly a lower scrutiny on the display ads," he says. "They're not really looking to change it iteratively to optimize results."
Tillinghast anticipates two directions for improvement in SERPs. One will be in recognizing small but high-value audiences.
"Search engines are pretty poor right now at finding incredibly valuable audiences that a few advertisers are willing to pay a ton of money for," he says. "The other way I see improvement is through more of a winnowing process for media and creative. As more inventory is converted to display and flash ads, those who are capable of being iterative and flexible with that creative will offer advertisers a great advantage."
Until then, Singh says flatly, "The ads that you see today on the search engines are the best we know how to do."
Robert Moskowitz is a consultant and author who speaks and writes frequently in the U.S. and abroad on topics such as white collar productivity, knowledge management, practical use of the internet, telecommuting, caring for aging parents and the business applications of information technologies. Read full bio.