You know there has always been a connection between search and display advertising results. However, if you talk to the AOL rep, they only know one medium. Ditto with Yahoo!. Throw Ask in there as well. They all have vast display ad opportunities, decent search products (AOL launched Search Market Place – a white label of Ad Words), yet despite much research, including some of their own to support integration, they silo the respective media categories.
Finally, Yahoo is brining them under one roof. Their announcement a couple of weeks ago is a welcome step. In time, our service team will have better access to the display side of the house. Currently, we deal with different people to buy display and search. There is no connection in the programs internally. This presents a strong disconnect on the side of Yahoo! with our programs. But, this should iron itself out with the new structure.
There is a huge benefit in the self-service search tools, backed by support of the account service team. In addition to a better coordinated program through integrated account teams, I have no doubt that they will adapt the same tool set for managing display programs. This is just one indication that the major players are taking search and display integration seriously.
Some would point to Google as an example of tools already integrated. However, this is only part of the equation. What gives the others a leg up is the control of and ability to integrate the display and search programs at a strategic level as well as a tactical or tool based level. Google is fine if you just want to throw display ads out to a network, or target some particular sites. But, in their model, no one at Google is an expert in the content sites themselves.
AOL, Yahoo, MSN and (if they care to exploit it) Ask all have the expertise in the content development, user experience and user tracking that can be leveraged in the integration of search and display advertising. A couple of months ago, I mentioned AOL’s search back. This product allows you to target those who searched on a particular keyword (custom), or category of keywords (standard) even if they did not click on your ad. Yahoo has a beta that they closed for further modification that can do very similar targeting. This is the most obvious application of integrated search and display advertising.
Beyond this, they can see the surfing habits of users tracked backwards from specific events, like a particular search. In this, they can develop targeted display based on likelihood to conduct particular category searches. In a longer purchase process, they can target display ads to areas where users tend to go post search on category terms. With the proper modeling, they can utilize their content display programs to target those who were likely to have done a category search on someone else’s search engine.
The bottom line, search and display integration are finally getting a serious look from some of the major companies that have and control both. As search marketers, we need to expand and become familiar with both as well. For years, we have behaved as if search is it’s own little island, acknowledging external impacts, but never really planning with them. That world is over. To continue to be cutting edge search marketers, we now have to understand and be able to work with the display side in a strategic way, if not actually become the display side.
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