Search advertising a few years ago was "the thing" for Advertisers to reach their prospective Customers. The relevancy of a customer interested in an advertiser’s product was determined by the type of searches that he makes. Search Advertising had some great advantages that could reap benefits for the advertisers like:
Cost Control: You could control the cost that you would incur according to your plan. You could determine which keywords to bid for and how high.
Targeting: there is a plethora of targeting options in paid search. Everything from location to placement to network targeting. You can control who is seeing your ads making every dollar you spend more efficient.
Direct ROI:There is tons of data behind paid search. Setting up goals and conversions (especially for e-commerce sites) can help you directly link your marketing dollars to returns.
Instant:Need traffic today? As soon as you set up your campaigns, you’ll get the placements you pay for.
Like every other product that exists in the market Search has its disadvantages as well which was a challenge and for a success Search campaign to be executed a Campaign Manager needed to have enough knowledge of the product.
There are many settings that a Campaign Manager needed to keep in mind like, targeting, and optimization strategies that can be used for profitable campaigns. Organizing and strategizing these can take a lot of time and expertise.
Another major challenge that Advertisers starts to face once is the increased competition in this market has driven costs up, more so in certain markets. Higher competition also means that those companies with big budgets and man power tend have the dominant positions.
Small and Medium businesses which initially tried to get into the Digital Advertising through search (since it was more relevant to them as compared to Display or Branding) faced the heat and could not carry on for long. Companies have always wanted to get into the Digital Marketing opportunities but might not have seen comparable dividends as compared to traditional Advertising (especially the localized advertising)
RTB or Real Time Bidding came to the picture with lot of scope during the same time. Below are few reasons why RTB based Display advertising makes sense for Search marketers:
>> Data-driven approach: Search marketing is based on data (either available or input). They constantly analyze data since it helps make optimization decisions that will affect campaign performance and improve ROI. The same is the case with RTB display advertising. With automated algorithms for optimization, a data-centric approach and analytical thinking RTB helps determining starting points and setting campaign strategy.
>> Granularity of placement: SEM is accustomed to managing large quantities of segments. In fact, for search advertising, each keyword is an audience section in itself (the users who have searched for that term). SEM Campaign Mangers are accustomed to bidding and optimizing thousands of segments now they would be adept at managing the sophisticated segmentation options offered by RTB display today. While traditional display advertising targets only audience segment related websites, RTB enables advertisers to bid on and test thousands of segments.
>> Knowledge of search keywords: Search marketing is keyword focused hence, search marketers have considerable understanding of keyword lists, and know how to bid, report, and optimize on individual keywords. These are exactly the skills needed for contextual & behavioural targeting, which is one of the most effective techniques in RTB. In short, it is the practice of targeting users based on their recent search history, and its performance is driven at the keyword level.
>> Knowledge of contextual keywords: SEM professionals run campaigns in various content networks, and are familiar with creating contextual targeting categories based on keyword lists and this same capability is available in RTB. While some RTB’s contextual inventory is available in pre-defined categories, advertisers can now customize their efforts by using keywords to define and target contextual categories in RTB.
>> Retargeting: RTB gives you the advantage of Re-Targeting users who have visited or shown interest for the products or services advertised by the Company. Re-Targeting helps advertisers improve ROI since you target your advertisement only to specific interested audiences.
Therefore RTB has brought the SMB segment advertisers to the digital advertising arena because many of its attributes are parallel to the sister channel, search, it represents an ideal opportunity for SEM advertisers. RTB has evolved into an effective channel that is experiencing impressive growth. Those who apply their “search craft” to online display could boost their ROI and grow their budgets.
