I’m not really surprised that Hitwise, via the fabulous Robin Goad, have reported that clicks to retailers from paid search have declined slightly over the last year.
While search volumes are growing year on year because of the usual reasons – more time spent online, broadband penetration, better devices and offline marketing campaigns driving people online, the economic situation is obviously to blame for consumers not leaping online to buy stuff like they used to before all this mess.
In a piece I wrote yesterday entitled US Consumer Research Says Keep Investing in Search – Just Be Smarter! the research from comScore in the US says that people are still searching and some are surfing to just combat the stress brought on by the financial crisis!
67% of US consumers say search engines are important when they are shopping as that’s how they are navigating to brands’ products and services. However, as Carol Bartz from Yahoo! said recently - "Search is the equivalent of online window shopping right now. People are browsing around, and not clicking through to buy."
So with some advertisers a tad reticent to invest as much as they did maybe last year, it’s not difficult to see that there may be fewer clicks on those more commercial ads.
Last week Search Engine Land quoted Efficient Frontier’s latest research – “The drop in CPCs indicates a deflation in the marketplace. Thus we find ourselves at an interesting cross-road. On the one hand, advertisers are cutting budgets resulting in cheaper clicks, on the other hand more users are searching online.”
All the conversations I’ve had with other search engines, analysts and marketing professionals this year have rendered one common theme, and that is that those advertisers that continue to invest, recognise the positive branding effect search can have on their campaigns, pay for some decent analytics data and are willing to train their teams to think a new way during this economic re-calibration will emerge during the upturn as leaders in their space.
Holding your nerve in a channel that has proven to return and then some, will pay even better dividends in the long run!
