±±¾©Èü³µpk10

It has been a flat few months for direct marketing - and for ad spend in general. But the one area that is steaming ahead is internet search, as consumers are increasingly going online for information.

Nick Hynes, CEO of search marketing company, The Search Works, whose credits include launching Air Miles' electronic points system, says: "Budgets available for direct marketing in Europe and the UK will be increasingly under pressure to be used for search marketing."

Value for money is the main reason. According to Hynes, US research shows search has a lead based on the fact that search marketing costs, on average, 40 cents (20p) compared with $9.90 (£5.50) for traditional DM.

Chrysi Philalithes, European marketing director at pay-per-click (PPC) provider Miva, adds: "Direct response is all about targeting the right user at the right time and you get the most targeted users through search marketing. It's performance-based marketing based on a price and on a targeted audience."

Clients seem to agree as budgets migrate online. The Bellwether Report from the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising, showed that while DM budgets remained unchanged for the second quarter of 2005, online spend increased by an average of 23 per cent. This is despite UK marketing budgets being cut for the first time in almost two years.

Bouyant market

According to Jupiter Research, 55 per cent of all e-commerce transactions originate from a search, so it is hardly surprising that the market is so buoyant. The UK market for search engine marketing (SEM) is predicted to rise by 70 per cent and be worth £598 million in the UK by the end of 2005, (E-consultancy).

Search engines such as Google, Ask Jeeves, Yahoo! and, most recently, MSN are battling for a slice of this lucrative market. To vie for visitor clicks and advertisers, each firm is preparing to unveil new search tools and services (see above).

"A key and emerging area is local search and integration of search into mobile," says David Graham, search business manager at MSN.

"More and more queries are becoming localised as all the major players offer local search capabilities. Within the next 12 months we will see this grow considerably."

While search engines have still to make mobile search pay, he says, it will grow as a source of leads for advertisers as technology improves.

The growth is fuelled mainly by increased spending on paid-for search listings or pay-per-click advertising, operated through listing providers such as Miva or Google's AdWords, which accounts for 84 per cent of the search market.

Sponsored listings appear down the right-hand side of a search results page, or above the bulk of the results. Advertisers pay when someone clicks through to their site, but Miva plans to launch a pay-per-call service later this year. This will mean that advertisers pay for leads delivered when customers ring a campaign telephone number.

PPC appeals to brands because it offers transparent media. However, brands cannot ignore 'organic' or 'natural' search optimisation and there is increased spending in this area. This is the process of designing or modifying a site so that it appears high up in the natural or main rankings.

Best Western Hotels has improved its results through optimisation by search engine marketing company Spannerworks. Jo Burman, e-business manager comments: "From no visibility and low traffic volumes, we have enjoyed more than one million visitors from the major search engines within the past year (June 2004 to June 2005)."

Organic surfing

Mazda has signed a deal with mOne for a search optimisation programme to promote its new MX-5 roadster launch in November. Daniel Brown, customer relationship management (CRM) manager at Mazda UK said the launch would combine DM and email. "It will be a major part of our CRM remit."

More than 70 per cent of traffic comes from natural listings, according to E-consultancy.com, so it is cost-effective to begin by optimising your site to ensure this is the case.

Organic rankings are based on search engines' particular algorithyms, which change continuously, and are boosted by high visitor numbers, good content, navigation and links to related sites.

John Straw, CEO at search optimisation company NetRank, suggests making sure that the page title and description metatags are not only descriptive of the page but enticing to the reader.

"Let text speak rather than images. To a search engine, pictures are meaningless binary files."

Industry wisdom holds that while natural search brings in traffic, paid-for listings are better for specific and time-sensitive campaigns.

Paid-for listings complement natural, and when using it, positioning is everything. "We would advise that you aim to appear in the top five rankings, if not the top three," says Philalithes.

"While it does not have to be the highest poition, very few people go to the next page," she adds.

Flexibility reduces waste

PPC is transparent says E-consultancy co-founder Ashley Friedlein, but adds: "You pay for it on an action basis. The price goes up when more people bid on a term. The question is, how much can you afford to pay? There is no point if it does not get you in the top 10 rankings."

But Jeff Levick, head of vertical markets group, Google Europe, says it is a myth that search needs to be expensive because you only pay when customers click through to your site.

"If it usually costs you £50 for every credit card application, then £3 for a click does not look that expensive. Extrapolate that for every 1,000 clicks, with a conversion rate of five per cent, and that is how you gain ROI (return on investment)."

Search can be used flexibly across different campaigns, says Philalithes. "This is the only media that gives you the flexibility to run seasonal campaigns from which you get zero waste from your ad budget."

Levick adds that search marketing offers the opportunity to adapt campaigns in real time. "The creative is the text, there is no design department involved. Times for a campaign to go live are minutes and hours - not days or weeks."

Hynes says search marketing works best when it integrates with the messages from other marketing media. "If a strapline is used in DM, radio or TV, then that should be incorporated into the listing title or the text that sits underneath."

As advertisers have just a couple of hundred characters to play with online, using a brand message can help cut through search listings.

Levick admits there is a distinct role for different media, and points out that DM and search make a winning combination.

"DM will increase awareness and stimulate interest in a product. That interest and awareness can take people online for more information. When customers do this, your search campaign will reiterate the message you are promoting."

SEARCH MARKETING - WHAT'S NEW?

- Overture has re-branded to Yahoo Search Marketing in the US, and will re-brand internationally later this year. Overture offers a mobile travel directory across Vodafone, Orange and the Yahoo Wap portal.

- Google has extended its AdSense programme to include display advertising for the first time. It has also introduced a number of new local search options. It has launched its shopping comparison service, Froogle, and has launched a search service on Wap.

- Microsoft is trialling a paid-search advertising service to compete with Google and replace its partnership with Yahoo's paid-for search subsidiary Overture. The service is expected to be the first component of an ad management platform, labelled adCenter, that will allow marketers to run digital marketing on MSN through a desktop-based system, including banner, rich media and email campaigns.

- Ask Jeeves UK unveiled its new Zoom technology tool in the UK after a May rollout in the US. It promises to improve navigation and allow users to refine or expand their search.

- Yahoo Search has launched a service giving internet users access to multiple public and subscription online content sources from one search engine.

CASE STUDY

Heinz has an established customer relationship management programme for its baby food range which integrates DM and online. Pregnant mums are encouraged to visit the website www.tinytums.co.uk. It provides information guiding them from early pregnancy, birth to weaning age, alongside baby food product information.

The brand wanted to harness the potential of search marketing to get them to the site. Heinz's incumbent digital agency, Swamp, started looking at the areas pregnant women searched online and, using data from search engines, identified a lot of searches for baby names.

"It was a eureka moment," says Paul Mallett, managing director of Swamp. "Anyone searching for baby names online was pretty much guaranteed to be a pregnant mum. You cannot buy searches under PPC (pay per click) unless you have relevant content. So, we thought what content should we develop?"

The agency developed a new website with a baby name generator on www.dontcallme baby.com which linked to the baby food site.

"It is very simple in principle and it became a powerful tool."

Mums who registered on the site were sent a Tiny Tums club information pack. This is followed up by mailings at three months, six months and at the weaning period, which includes product samples, parenting information and freebies.