Search has been the mainstay of the digital advertising industry ever since the likes of Google and Overture began to monetise search engine results pages so effectively back in the early noughties. Since then, the practice of using search results to better market a brand’s products or services has gone from strength to strength, and today, paid search advertising represents the largest single form of digital ad spend in the UK, with a 59% share.
So, looking at the history of search, when did the ‘Big Bang’ occur, how has it evolved, and what should advertisers be doing today to develop their techniques and ensure they’re getting the most out of their digital ad spend?
The ‘Neanderthal’ search
The turn of the 21st century marked the very beginnings of search: In the early 2000s, Overture was the first search engine to provide a pay-per-click placement search service. Overture was acquired by Yahoo! Search Marketing in 2003, which started Yahoo!’s journey to offering pay-per-click internet advertising services. Not far behind was Google, and since this point, the popularity of search marketing techniques has sky-rocketed.
The ‘Homo Sapien’ search
Today, British consumers are spending one in 12 of their waking hours online, giving advertisers a huge opportunity to get their ads in front of their intended audience. But, as consumers come to spend more of their time online, they’re generating more and more data, some of which is useful, and some of which is not. To sift through this mass of data and deliver more targeted campaigns, advertisers are increasingly using machine-based transactions, data, and complex algorithms.
Programmatic buying is a revolutionary development that is helping advertisers to create broad audience segments and ensure the ads they’re displaying are being targeted at the right people. The growth in programmatic buying is indicative of the shift taking place in the advertising industry, away from analogue towards a digital environment where buyers get access to control, scale and low costs.
Using programmatic buying to cast the net wide and target as large an audience as possible is all well and good, but it should be remembered that the ad tech ecosystem today is very complex. Every day, advertisers are presented with tens of billions of opportunities to bid for digital space on ad marketplaces and auctions take place in a couple of hundred milliseconds.
Advertisers, Agency Trading Desks and those companies buying media through commoditised Demand Side Platforms (DSPs) are all trying to understand the value of consumer data and the best way to use it to achieve the results that this data revolution keeps promising to deliver. Pre-packaged audience segments with little granularity still lean towards a targeting level similar to verticalised channels on an inventory level. If they don’t get it right, most certainly a significant proportion of their budget is being poured down the drain.
As search continues to evolve, the advent of DSPs and programmatic buying is bringing with it a new wave of advertising. Display advertising is being combined with search to target new users with relevant ads at the right time, enabling advertisers to ramp up campaign performance and deliver better results.
The future of search
The next stage of programmatic buying development lies in moving from big data to smart data. Not all data is of equal value to advertisers. And not all search data is of equal value to advertisers either: some will be derived from search engines, premium, second tier, whilst others will come from websites’ own search boxes.
Advertisers have traditionally used big data and set algorithms to target a mass audience, but this way, the audience will be served an ad that may or may not be relevant to them. Using smart data however, advertisers will benefit from a more granular-level of targeting. By prioritising the quality over the quantity of data, they will be empowered to segment audiences down to an individual user level and target them more sophisticatedly.
Focusing on search data is a way of embracing the up and coming “smart data” trend. This is what search retargeters do. This enables advertisers to target consumers who have already shown intent to purchase; by taking the search terms they’ve entered into a search engine like Google, Yahoo! or Bing, or an on-site search box and serving them an ad that corresponds to those same keywords.
By also looking at the relationship between keyword phrases and time lag between actions (recency), more and more useful patterns emerge. This is known as Search Retargeting, a digital ad technique that is driving powerful change in the advertising world.
Search has come an awfully long way since the early days of Overture, and we’re now at a point where audiences can be segmented right down to an individual user level. By focusing on specific data sets, advertisers can serve more relevant display ads to those consumers most likely to click through, and critically, they can serve those ads at exactly the right time. This will increase the chance of conversion, and thus campaign performance and ROI.
