The Fear Of Not Spending Enough In Search

In which industry is 25.4% fraudulence acceptable? In search, that's where! This recent gem from MarketingVox notes that click fraud rose 15% in Q2 despite Yahoo and Google suggesting click fraud is much lower.

Can you imagine if your newspaper rep came in and told you their circulation counts were accurate to +/- 25.4%? What if DoubleClick or Atlas noted in their presentations that their impression counts were accurate to +/- 25.4%? It wouldn't fly, but search is different.

The reason for this is that when consumers are actively searching to find your product online you have no choice but to advertise there. One way of looking at this is simply to say, "OK, rather than think of 25.4% being fraud, we'll assume that our real clicks are just costing us 34% more." (The inverse of 25.4%.) The problem is that search click costs are already sky high! Anyone out there paying $3, $5, or even $10 per click? Most all of you are, and the reason is that it's scary not to be there.

But what if instead of spending $5/click, you could spend $1.67/click, getting 3 clicks for your $5 rather than one? And what if you could do this by catching consumers before they even knew they wanted to search for your product? The good news is that this is totally possible. CPC banner campaigns have their weaknesses, but when it comes to doing business on the web, banners can often perform significantly better than a search campaign ever will. Overcoming 3:1 odds is not easy.

In the end, advertisers need to establish goals and set their criteria for what will make their campaign successful. The likely outcome will be a blend of both SEM and display. So long as the advertiser realizes that a successful SEM campaign doesn't require being the top listing in every instance of every keyword on its list, and simultaneously that home page takeovers on major portals isn't the only way to do online display, both can co-exist and be profitable to the advertiser.