With search engines serving users and shareholders, marketers' needs often get shortchanged. Here's how to make the most of the situation.

Search is a performance-driven medium whose inherent ability to provide accountability has made it an online marketing powerhouse. But while there is much to like about the CPC model, it also suffers from systemic flaws that complicate the marketer's quest to reach his targeted audience in a cost-efficient manner.

One significant flaw pertains to the conflicting missions of the search engines themselves. Search engines have three distinct constituencies they must serve: users (who reward the engine with the best user experience with traffic and loyalty), marketers (who compete against each other for the privilege of having their listings visible to users), and the engines' own shareholders whose interest is having the engines monetize their inventory as profitably as possible.

These competing missions often mean that marketers are caught in the middle. While shareholders appreciate the fact that listings are sold at auction, thus extracting maximum value from every transaction, marketers must fight each other for every click in a classic "zero-sum" (if I win, you lose) game. Although users might prefer that search engines speed them to their destinations without unnecessary exposure to commercial messages, shareholders demand that such exposure be maximized.

One can argue that search engines actually have a powerful disincentive against delivering users too quickly or too effectively to their destinations. For example, if a user searching for a brand such as "Best Buy" was delivered instantly to the bestbuy.com website without being given a chance to click on listings paid for by Best Buy (or competitors buying this brand term), a powerful monetization opportunity would be lost.

Yet Google last month rolled out a beta feature called Search Within Search, which adds an additional layer of results (and another opportunity for competitors to grab the attention of searchers) when a user makes a Search Within Search query. While shareholders might welcome such an innovation (because it expands saleable inventory) and users might like it too (because it's convenient), some marketers are already seeing red; several high-profile e-tailers, including Amazon.com, have opted out of Search Within Search, arguing that their site-based searches are superior to what Google offers and because they do not wish to expose searchers to additional traffic-stealing competitors.

These competing interests determine everything that happens in the paid search marketplace, and marketers often find themselves in a state of continual frustration whenever the engines unilaterally decide to provide a new service or algorithmic enhancement without consulting them first. Consequently, it's quite understandable when they conclude that the interests of users and shareholders have been put ahead of their own.

Unfortunately, there's no easy way to address this issue, because search marketers are a long way from realizing their own collective bargaining power. As a result, we often see marketers giving up on paid search entirely, either by reverting to an SEO-only strategy or leaving the search marketplace altogether.

Until such time that search engines behave in a more advertiser-friendly manner, marketers really only have one course open to them, and that's to bear the pain and to play as efficient and aggressive a game as possible. They must look inward to identify and ruthlessly eliminate every possible inefficiency in their own campaigns, bid aggressively for choice audience segments, and be nimble enough to make rapid changes when search engines alter the features of their marketplace.

Most importantly, they must resist the temptation to be complacent once all of this hard work is done, because change is just around the corner, and this change is likely to have been implemented at the behest of users or shareholders!

If there's one bright spot in this picture, it's that many marketers have just begun the process of optimizing their search campaigns. I only know this because at Didit we often take over accounts formerly run by major SEM agencies that are, to be blunt, in states of such horrible disrepair that they require a complete gut and rebuild process. The fact that so many marketers are running badly constructed campaigns means that there are real rewards ahead for those who manage to get it right.

David Pasternack is president of Didit, a New York-based search marketing firm.