Having revolutionized the paid search advertising industry with its Adwords program (though the credit for pioneering this model goes to the Go network/ Overture), Google is making huge moves to ensure that it continues to garner share of the paid search advertising budget from the other players with some very important distribution and partnership deals.
There are four partnership deals in recent months that highlight Google’s strategy to leverage the communities of other big players to expand its own reach. Of course, some of these announcements are fairly recent and therefore a bit premature to gauge their financial success, but the potential is striking.
The four distribution partnerships in question are Google’s deal with MySpace, eBay, Valpak and Intuit. By targeting four diverse segments, Google is ensuring that its reach, which is already unparalleled, gets even deeper.
Targeting four different audiences
The phenomenal growth of MySpace as a happening community that is now much beyond an online platform for adolescents means that marketers cannot ignore such a captive audience. No wonder that social networking properties such as MySpace, Bebo and Facebook are coveted targets for the major search players.
While both Microsoft and Google were eyeing an exclusive search and advertising deal with MySpace, the latter managed to win it, probably because of its reputation for a much superior search engine, a more established ad distribution service (compared to Microsoft’s AdCenter) and obviously, its bigger advertiser base.
Paid search advertisers who have a product/ service portfolio aimed at a young, heavily Internet-using audience couldn’t have had it any better. There are certainly some doubts on whether the traffic from MySpace can be deemed to be of “good quality” and whether it will generate a good enough return on an advertiser’s paid search spend. That is certainly something which advertisers will have to find out with careful planning and monitoring of their campaigns.
The other major coup is Google’s tie up with eBay to be the exclusive ad distribution partner outside the United States. Strangely, this announcement comes just months after a similar announcement between Yahoo & eBay (the state of that agreement is now open to conjecture). The volume of traffic that eBay generates is staggering and the world’s biggest auction marketplace attracts an audience that is predisposed to buying products and services on the Internet. While this distribution arrangement may actually materialize early next year, a very huge marketing channel has opened up for paid search advertisers, which may be irresistible particularly for B2C (business to consumer) advertisers.
The importance of local search in a search marketing mix cannot be overstated; it is one of the fastest growing areas of paid search advertising mainly because of the highly targeted reach that it can provide. Google entered into an agreement with Valpak to distribute printable coupons for free through local listings on Google Maps. Small businesses, which have been using coupons’ distribution through Valpak as part of their marketing strategy, will now have their coupons seen on Google Maps as well, thereby expanding the distribution for their coupons, which should help make a direct impact on their sales revenues. Last but certainly not the least, Google and Intuit, the makers of the accounting package Quickbooks, agreed to offer Adwords functionality from within Quickbooks. Considering that several millions of small businesses use Quickbooks as their accounting package, Google will be able to directly tap into the small business market and get them to advertise online. Moreover, the 2007 version of Quickbooks will not only be a channel to directly start and manage Adwords advertising, it can also be used to post products to Google Base and create a listing on Google Maps.
Implications for search marketers
The opportunities for marketers to get online and use the various channels are phenomenal; therein lays the challenge too. Even while Google and the other search engines are striving to make online advertising simpler, greater the number of options available, greater is the need for specialized knowledge and expertise to help marketers and businesses maximize the opportunities from the various channels.
The availability of these wonderful options is a marketer’s delight; however, if not used properly, it can be a surefire way of wasting marketing money.
Professional marketing firms have a very important role to play in helping businesses plan and prioritize their spend, establish and monitor the key metrics that determine a high and positive return on investment on marketing dollars. For example, would targeting on MySpace be a good option, or should an advertiser take advantage of distribution through eBay? It makes sense to turn to online marketing specialists who not only have a role to play as service providers executing marketing campaigns for companies, but also the more important role as strategic consultants who can make a difference to companies’ bottomline.
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