By Aisling M. Brennan
Account Director
I was fortunate enough to attend the recent Search Engine Strategies (SES) conference in New York at the beginning of the month. SES NYC is the biggest trade conference of the year and it gives us search marketers a chance to get up close and personal with representatives from the search engines. However this year I was overwhelmed at the vast numbers of attendees at the conference where I and 5,999 others attended over 60 sessions during the four day period. This was much a larger experience than in years previous and is indicative of the emerging importance of search marketing to marketers.
So what did the Search Engines and Industry pundits forecast for 2006? What were the hot topics at the conference?
1. Online Ad Spend Will Continue to Increase
On average only 5% of marketing budgets is spent online despite online media capturing over 20% of all media consumption. Pundits expect both to rise as more marketers shift their ad budgets and consumers spend more time online.
In fact data just released by the IAB and PricewaterhouseCoopers estimate that total online US advertising revenues for 2005 will exceed $12.5 billion. That's an impressive 30% annual increase over the previous revenue record of $9.6 billion in 2004.
Four basic trends support the continued growth of Internet ad spending:
- Larger ad budgets overall
- Shifts in ad budgets from other media to the Internet
- More marketers including online as part of their campaigns
- Increased prices for both branding ads (display and rich media) and direct response vehicles (such as paid search)
With eMarketer forcasting 24.7% increase in spending growth for 2006, when Internet ad spending will reach $15.6 billion, the continued strength of the medium is only set to continue.
2. Proliferation of PPC Ad Networks.
By end of the year there will be growth in the number of Tier 1 PPC networks. 2006 will see the emergence of five major PPC networks as the "big five" engines (Google, Yahoo!, MSN, AOL and Ask Jeeves) launch their own PPC networks. Currently only Yahoo!, Google and Ask have PPC programs. MSN's adCenter is in beta, and AOL's Marketplace is due to launch later this year.
Although this PPC network diversification will involve a great deal more effort on the part of the advertiser to maximise reach, it should enable us to curb the escalating bid prices currently seen on Yahoo! Search Marketing and Google Adwords.
3. PPC Behavioural Targeting
Behavioural targeting was another buzz word at the conference. The launch of MSN's adCenter PPC platform has the advantage of incorporating behavioural targeting into search campaigns. This has proven to be hugely successful with marketers and users alike and will necessitate the other PPC networks to follow suit, if they are to remain competitive.
4. Vertical Search
Vertical Search is the new area of interest when it comes to the real estate of search results pages. Even if users don't choose to do a vertical search (for example, Craigslist is considered a vertical search engine), there's more chance that the major players will display some vertical listings at the top of their "default" results. This is predicted to be a hugely influential area for organic search marketing in 2006.
6. Social Networking
The popularity of social networking online and the profileration of social networking sites leads many to believe that this is an area of massive potential.
7. Duplicate content
One of the dominant issues the search engines relayed to us was their problem with duplicate content. They consider duplicate content to be SPAM (see Black Hat Online Marketing Tactics: What Exactly Are They?) and will penalize sites enormously for this. They're expending a lot of resources in efforts to identify and penalize duplicate content, so engage in it at your peril. You've been warned.
To conclude 2006 is gearing up to be another successful year for Search Marketing. With more ad spend available, more media fragmentation amongst consumers and the diversifiaction of the PPC networks, it's set to be an interesting year.
BTW if you're interested in learning more about SES, please note that it is now on a world tour and will be in London at the end of May. Maybe I'll see you there...
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