“Displaying Search” is a column capturing the intersection of display advertising and search marketing.
Today’s column is written by Dax Hamman, VP, Display Media, at iCrossing, a digital marketing agency.
The average search marketer doesn’t rate display very highly. They operate in a very ROI-orientated world based on hard facts and close to 100% accountability. They see display as fluff, and place little credit on what they see as a view-thru-reliant world lacking in the same level of accountability that they are held to. But the increasing awareness of newer buying models created by the exchanges is making search marketers reassess.
Their brand clients are adding to this pressure; the ongoing macro-economic situation has forced brands to look hard at how they invest in digital; ROI goals are King, branding goals less so. SEM budgets have been the big winner from this situation, but can only continue to be so up to a point. As a full service digital agency that specializes in serving fortune 500 brands, iCrossing has long standing SEM programs that have reached their maximum spend level (whilst still maintaining an ROI goal). And so when the client calls and says they have more budget, where is that money to go?
Herman Takes On New Role
The other day a group of us at Efficient Frontier gathered in a conference room to discuss display optimization. We met to dig into the comparative ROI for various audience segments, including site-driven retargeting and 3rd-party purchased segments. One of our lead engineers developed an interesting analogy that mapped audience targets to search term types. The search term to audience segment analogy is an interesting way to think about relevance and tactically design portfolios of targets for display campaigns.
The digital advertising start-up world continues to play its siren song as the résumé pages of LinkedIn reveal moves and machinations within the industry.