Response to WebProNews Rich Ord Column “Pay Per Click Party Over?”
Los Angeles Internet Marketing •
October 18th, 2007
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Rich Ord (CEO of Ientry) recently posted an article in WebProNews Titled “Pay Per Click Party Over?”
Rich puts in 5 reasons that PPC will be losing effectiveness, and getting less useful.
Like banner ads, they are becoming too ubiquitous (- adsense on every page etc), declining relevance, rising costs, increasing options for marketers online, and bad press about the trustworthiness of the ads.
I disagree with him on many of the points. Although the party may be over for small business, it definitely isn’t close to over for the search engines or the advertisers.
Search marketing has introduced a standard of reporting and accountability to the marketing world that hasn’t been seen before, and all of the traditional industries are losing a ton of ground on that. This is all on the advertiser side.
Additionally, I would suggest that search marketing has also provided users something that hasn’t been there before - pull advertising over push. Gord Hotchkiss recently posted an article about the nirvana of advertising for consumers. I think that search provides paid results that are not intrusive (unlike banner ads).
In the company I worked for, my research has shown that although the cost per conversion has risen, the actual conversion rate has remained the same or higher.
1) Search is too ubiquitous. Since search marketing is based on what people are interested in, and they aren’t intrusive, there is no way search is going away. It may decline on publisher sites, as more people put it on, when the quality of sites are lower, I don’t know, but as far as search on sites, I think that it is brilliant to have text ads instead of banner ads.
2) Rising costs. This is great for the search engines. The cost is based on an auction model, which is supply and demand. That means that the marketplace will never be out of the works. Many people will still advertise even though they are only on page two of the ads. So if any big advertiser does drop out, they would quickly be replaced.
The real person the party is over for is the small advertiser (like me). We can only get leads as long as it’s profitable. The big advertisers can afford a much higher cost per conversion, as the lifetime value for each customer is way larger.
3) Increasing options. I don’t think increasing options are going to lower the amount of searchers. The average time spent online is much larger, and I think it’s only going to grow, which means that users aren’t going to spend less time searching for what they need.
4) Bad Press - this could always be an issue, but I think click fraud is out of perspective, and will not gain too much traction.
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