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1) What will be the future of pay per click search engine advertising? Where do you see it in the next one, three and five years? How will it evolve?
2) Can an internet business that solely depends on pay per click advertising for clicks survive?
3) What are the challenges faced by PPC search engines in the future? Fraud?
4)On the other side of Google AdWords, Overture & FindWhat, which PPC search engine should one keep an eye on?
5) Do you see any form of advertising that will unseat PPC advertising in the future?
Can anybody hazard a guess?
We look at the cost / results on a weekly basis. If ROI is not there, change it or pause it or drop it. There is no 3 to 5 years out with PPC. They deliver results OR ELSE.
Personally I am already looking at every other option out there apart from PPC.
PPC is great if it works and the ROI is good.
as for where it will be in 3-5 years, who knows.
I dont even know what is going to happen next week :)
Shak
1) What will be the future of pay per click search engine advertising? Where do you see it in the next one, three and five years? How will it evolve?
A year from now I see a lot of the wannabes kicked into touch. There will be a handful of providers, with the usual suspects being in the frame. The ones that take quality, relevancy, fraud, ROI seriously (that's the providers not the advertisers). A few pay lip service to it now and have no place at the table.
2) Can an internet business that solely depends on pay per click advertising for clicks survive?
As long as all the other aspect of their business model work then yes, most definately. PPC alone though will not make up for a poor product, poor distribution, poor service.
3) What are the challenges faced by PPC search engines in the future? Fraud?
Fraud is going to happen, it happens in the real world. It's how it's dealt with that matters, not the fact it happens. Other challenges will be the value proposition as more advertisers come into the market. Overture have seen a 61% increase in their average cost per click from 21 cents to 34 cents. That is bound to impact on the ROI of advertisers getting it wrong. The other challenge I see is the barrier to entry for new players. With the advent of longer term contracts all of the big search providers will be in 2-3 year contracts, so the market will be dominated once again by a handful of companies.
4)On the other side of Google AdWords, Overture & FindWhat, which PPC search engine should one keep an eye on?
Depends on which market you operate in, but Bidsmart, Espotting, Mirago in the UK. Overture, Espotting in Europe. ah-ha and the ones you mentioned in the States/Canada. Espotting in Asia.
5) Do you see any form of advertising that will unseat PPC advertising in the future?
If the providers can get their act together then affiliate schemes could provide a good complimentary solution. PPC will also have a place in the mix for a lot of companies, shame the ones that don't do it now, don't do it now, they are missing out on the best of times I think.
Just some opinions.
Coming from a company that had a solid base before PPC, or the internet for that matter, I would say that you could survive, but not THRIVE. No business ever grew unless it kept looking for other ways to attract customers.
Besides, there are only so many keywords and an ever increasing number of companies using PPC.
>3) What are the challenges faced by PPC search engines in >the future? Fraud?
Keeping relevant to the end user and still making money at the same time.
>5) Do you see any form of advertising that will unseat PPC >advertising in the future?
Email marketing, once spam laws are finally hashed out in the government. Then the lists will start to fill out and become more targeted. It may not unseat PPC but I think more companies will find email marketing more lucrative than PPC. Many already do, for that matter.
I'll say. I have not seen one of our traditional competitors out there on the PPC ads. To date, it has been one of the better internet related things that we have done. I hope they never figure it out. :)
its the opposite for me, we were 1 of the 1st in our market to goo PPC, competitors very quickly followed behind.
However the funniest bit is Now they think they are SEOgurus :)
What fun I have.
Shak
We'll start to see industries that have their own PPCSE's. For example, we operate a pay-per-click engine targeted specifically at the web hosting niche.
Our engine is not term-based, but feature-based, meaning end users select from a list of checkboxes to conduct their searches; they don't enter a phrase. This will probably be a feature of future industry-specific engines. It allows for a more targeted search, and it doesn't require an advertiser to maintain a bid/listing for scores and scores of word combinations. Also, our partners are themselves very targeted -- we offer web hosting searching capability on hosting-related sites. Overture, etc. will continue to dominate the broad-based portals, but niche PPCSEs will distribute via more finely-tuned avenues and, consequently, will provide superior ROI. Certainly not a replacement for Overture and the gang, niche PPCSE's will grow significantly over the next few years to become very strong complimentary services.
Like mainstream search engines, PPC will go vortal. The Web was never designed to be centalised anyway. At heart and by design the Internet, of which the Web is it's major popular protocol just now, is a distributed model, designed in part by the US military to make sure that if one part of the communication system was attacked, other parts will continue to function. The centralization model where information is centralised where certain commercial interests have "forced" this model on a naturally distributed system is showing strains, manifested in 1. the poor relevancy of PPI or PPR engines, and even alleged lower relevancy for searches in Google for highly commercial or competitive searches, and 2. the dot com crash. Businessmen who are used to monopolizing industries offline have or are finding that is has no long term viability or reliability on the Web. Google's current "domination" of mainstream search and Overture's "big slice" of PPC are not sustainable. They are simply artifacts of a still immature medium within an evolving delivery mechanism.
Expect also for advertising to return to credible, authoritative sites in each industry or market segment taking market share from generalist search engine/PPC models in future.
This is a medium to long term scenario, not short term. But i beleive, with all humility, that that is the way we are heading.
Overture may reach a peak in the next year or two and decline. Google may steamroll them, other providers may build out their own PPC systems. MSN is unpredicable IHMO, and if they were to lose either YAHOO! or MSN Overture would probably be shedding staff overnight. MSN and Overture already have the power to squeeze Overture for a pretty large chunk of the pie since without them Overture has no business.
There's been lots of take about "vortals" for a long time. It seems like that model would have materialized to a much greater degree by now if it was going to happen. It may still, but in the near future I don't see lots of people flocking to narrowly focused search services.
Maybe its just me, but I often use Google to find a specific page in a site that has a site search, even to find old threads here. When you can install the toolbar, bot have to actually go to the site and find virtually anything with one or two queries why go to a small search engine?
Another thing with niche search enignes is that the folks with the media dollars to spend need to know of them or be able to find them easily. They have to convince the bean counters that it is worth the time and money (setup cost) to work with smaller providers. IMHO it often is, but if the setup and reporting costs come out to be 30% of the total costs vs 5% with a big buy on Overture, screwy logic may end up dictating that the Overture campaign gets the dollars.
Since PPC is not strictly a direct response model, there may be new types of arrangements developed to enable both parties develop better measurements as to the true value of a click.
