As for why advertisers are committing such staggering amounts of money to Google, consider its usage numbers: In March, Google sites captured 48.3% of the U.S. search market, with 3.5 billion search queries performed, according to comScore. The closest competitor, Yahoo, accounted for 27.5% of the market, with 2.0 billion searches.
John Topping, director of Google's b-to-b technology industry segment, said the company's mission is to make marketing as relevant and meaningful as its search results, across all media types. "We're able to offer a global scale of reach at relevancy-based moments in a way that's measurable and where you can make changes according to measurable results," he said.
It's a media buy that's as attractive to b-to-b advertisers as it is to their consumer-marketing counterparts, and with good reason. A recent survey conducted by search engine marketing company Enquiro found that of more than 1,000 b-to-b buyers polled, 78.3% said they would use Google to conduct b-to-b product or service research, compared with 14.8% for Yahoo and 6.9% for Microsoft.
"Unless you're going to do really specific vertical applications and vertical market search, if you're doing search and you're not using Google, you're an idiot," said Bill Hebel, senior VP-media director at b-to-b agency Slack Barshinger.
Google offers marketers tremendous efficiencies, Hebel said. "When you start doing an ROI analysis, whether it's a cost-per-click or even if we track it all the way to a cost-per-lead basis, it wins hands down most times," he said. "It's just very, very efficient."
Google's bread-and-butter business is offering keyword-targeted pay-per-click ads on its search results pages, as well as display advertising opportunities through a network of publishing partners. The company also has initiatives to enable advertisers to place ads against print, audio (through an agreement with ClearChannel), video (it acquired YouTube last year) and mobile platforms. It made a major move to bolster its display advertising business with its recent deal to acquire DoubleClick, a provider of ad management technology.
"The big glaring hole in what Google didn't bring to the table was a real ownership of the display ad space," said Jason Klein, co-CEO of Special Ops Media. "The DoubleClick acquisition was clearly a way to fill in that gap and have them own the space."
"Between its performance-based abilities, its ability to drill down both geographically and psychographically via keywords and this enormous network where you're not confined to just google.com, [it's] a very compelling property for any online advertiser," Klein said.
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