Search Sense

The latest Forrester report, Europe’s Search Engine Marketing Investment Exceeds €8 Billion In 2012, on paints a very healthy picture of the European search market. With the sector set to grow from a current €4.5 billion to well beyond €8 billion by 2012 and taking half of all online marketing investment all search marketers should be overjoyed shouldn’t they?

In fact the UK’s increase over the period is the slowest of all European markets researched. There are a number of good reasons for this: we’re still by far the largest market, followed by Germany and France and have enjoyed the biggest growth over the past five years and UK companies still invest heavily in search and online.

I wonder, however, whether a slowing market at home combined with media agencies becoming specialists in their own right, and *everyone* joining the search bandwagon, and some clients taking paid search in-house, whether we will start to see some casualties? The 101 search business plan remains: invest in skills, technology and training or be damned.

You may have heard that the IAB and DMA have got together to create the first charter aimed at search marketing agencies. They hope to establish best practice for the industry. At Spannerworks we think it is about time that something like this is in place and welcome the compliance.

Striking the right balance can often determine the success of such charters. As a first step, the IAB and DMA seemed to have come in at the right level. The charter isn’t too detailed and criteria for compliance not too tough so it should be successful in gaining support from the search engines and industry.

I certainly hope that this will help make it easier for people to manage their search campaigns and report things like click fraud and trademarking issues. The only area there is likely to be hot debate around is search engine optimisation. While we don’t support the link-buying, it is normal practice for some markets so acceptance of certain codes of best practice may not be as straight forward.

On the whole, this move aligns the search marketing industry with standards accepted in other forms of marketing and can only help the industry progress as it should.

Dax Hamman comments on Glastonbury’s decision to sell more tickets by phone next year, in light of this year’s festival being ‘too middle-aged’. Why? Because older internet users are more likely to have broadband, and therefore stand a better chance of getting through online. On the other hand, Dax wonders if broadband might be one way to tempt more teenagers into libraries. (more…)

What a month… June has certainly kept the Spannerworks team busy. Our 10th anniversary celebrations started with a fantastic client party on Tuesday night in London. If you were there, thanks for coming and we hope you had fun. You can spot yourself in the snaps taken on the night on our Flickr page.

Spannerworks’ 10 years of experience means the team is in demand. June seems to be the month of choice for marketing events and the speaking invitations have been flying in…

Antony Mayfield, our head of content and media, nears the end of his summer roadshow with presentations at the Revolution Forum, NMK Forum, PR Week Summer Forum and yesterday’s Econsultancy What’s New in Online Marketing conference. You can also catch Antony at the upcoming IAB Engage for Branding conference on 26th July 2007.

Paul Doleman, our Head of Paid Search and CTO, has been sharing his knowledge at webinars and online marketing events for the finance world. Joined by our Head of Natural Search, Nilhan Jayasinghe, together they are teaching eager audiences how paid and natural search campaigns can and should work together. 

You also may have seen us at this week’s NMA Online Marketing Show. We exhibited and our Head of Business Development, David St John Tradewell, gave a seminar on universal search. Our stand was very busy and we look forward to catching up with everyone we met. 

On top of all of this, we are really excited to launch our Social Spaces programme this week. 

Phew. We’re all off for very quick nap before we leap in to the next ten years…see you there!

Google on the 16th of May announced the launch of “Universal Search” on their official blog, http://googleblog.blogspot.com. Universal Search is a combination of all of Google’s search offerings (Google Images, Video, Local, Blog, & News), displayed together within the natural search results. Marissa Mayer, Vice President of Search Products and User Experiences at Google commented on the launch, saying Google “want to help you find the very best answer, even if you do not know where to look”.

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Marketing professionals from the UK’s leading companies came together to talk about search at a recent Hitwise search seminar that was a complete sell out, held at the Waldorf in London.

With search spend expected to reach £1 billion in the UK alone this year, Hitwise and other industry experts - including Yahoo! Search Marketing, Microsoft and Spannerworks - discussed how to efficiently balance your paid and organic campaigns, and how to take advantage of new search opportunities.

This event I saw as being significant just by the volume and seniority of the delegates - it seems that search has well and truly arrived in the mainstream mix of media offered by the UK’s leading brands.

Heather Hopkins of hitwise comments on her blog about the event and specifically how search can help marketers during a product recall.

If you’d like a copy of Spannerworks’ presentation, please contact Charlotte McDougall on +44 (0) 1273 828100 or cmcdougallREMOVE@spannerworksME.com.

Mat Morrson of digital marketing consultancy Ryan Morrison & MacMillan has published a great post on its blog entitled “5 things you never knew about search” which quotes our very own David St John Tradewell liberally.

For the full run-down read the original article, but the five things are headlined:

1. It’s not about search, it’s about find.
2. Search businesses are service companies. They are only as good as the technology they employ.
3. Show me the money. (”If you can’t put a value on a transaction, you can’t optimise your search.”)
4. Good search businesses can’t afford to have all their staff in London offices.
5. Something makes people search….

I’d certainly agree emphatically with the first and last points especially.

But I’d go further, adding my own impressions as a brand communications specialist who has spent a few months in the world of search marketing now.

Often people see search marketing simply as a transaction-based or lead generation business. It is very, very good that, but it is also becoming more: search should be viewed as media, and search marketing as a part of brand communications as well as a powerful customer delivery tool.

Search is the most powerful application for making sense of the exponentially growing complexity of the online networked world.

Product information and pricing are only part of the story of how people are using the web, and search, in their daily lives, about how they navigate and make sense and use of online networks.

People are using the web (and therefore search) more than ever and their sophistication in its use, their demands of it, are growing more complex too. It’s an intimate, sometimes unwittingly so, relationship that many have with their search engines, and search marketing must evolve alongside that.

: : I’d also add to point two that search businesses are also only as good as the people they employ.  Technology is massively important, but not more important than people who can put it to best use, read and action data to best effect, plan and execute strategies to succeed, find  the best ways to market online with search.

This years ad-tech promises to be the best ever, there’s a real buzz about this years event and probably due to the ever increasing importance being placed on Search Marketing. (more…)

There’s a real sense that marketers are taking search, both paid and natural, far more seriously. (more…)

Yahoo’s CEO, Terry Semel got stuck into the search industry’s current favourite hot topic yesterday. On a call with analysts he outlined the company’s approach to tackling the issue on its Sponsor Results text-based search results ads. (more…)