SES: Everything But Google: Media Buyers Say Google is the Most Expensive, So Why Are We Getting Paid So Little

Today at the SES show in San Jose is a panel entitled “Everything But Google: Alternative Search Marketing Options”.

This is an interesting read because it is coming from the perspective of the media buyers.

Interesting from the media buyers perspective,  Google is the most expensive choice, but for publishers, our share of the revenue Google pays us continues to decline.

Here is a summary of the session courtesy of MediaPost

Andrew Goodman is moderating the panel this afternoon.

First Up Sage Lewis, Search Engine Watch Expert & President of Sagerocks.com.

Sage talks about some ways to buy media other than Google.

Buying media through bloggers, Pay Per Post.

The next one on his list is superpages.com he goes on to state that overall it converts very well.

Facebook business center allows you to buy ad space based on demographic, which at there are over 23 million people at facebook.

Quigo allows you to target newspapers and magizine, its pay per click and you can target specific locations.

Sage showcases through his own study that Yahoo! and MSN converts very well.

He shows that Superpages, ASK and Looksmart has a much lower cost per click.

Sages 3 tips,

Tip 1 – Buy alternative advertising through referrals

Tip 2 – Be every clear about your goals and time frames

Tip 3 – Allocate 10 –  25% of your online budget to testing

Next up is Jay Sears, EVP, Strategic Products and Business Development, Context Web

Jay talks about three things today:

– why search is not advertising

– why companies have spent 10B+

– Trends you should be watching

Jay says that search is at the bottom the pyramid, and content is at the top of the pyramid. He states that there is only so much search, the other part of the surfers time is spent elsewhere.

Targeting content vs search – When your targeting content you want to go wide versus search where you want to be as specific as possible.

Jay states that the display market is highly fragmented, there are over a million advertisers that hold market share.

He shows data that there are over 120 thousand blogs created each and every day.

The platforms that are being created with help aggregate all these sources for display advertising.

Trends that Jay has seen:

– Display / content advertising is the next battle ground

– Innovation is self service

– Buyers and sellers become traders

Next up is Jonathan Ewert, President and CEO, Looksmart

Jonathan talks about whats happening in the market, he talks about when ad prices on big search engines goes up it drives the need to diversify ad spend.

Very hard to touch Google’s reach

Search advertising networks are contextual searches in the internet outside of search engines.

Search ad networks can provide geo targeting capabilities and lower prices than main stream search engines.

Next up we have Dustin Kwan, Senior product manager, ASK Sponsored listings

They reach over 55 million unique visitors

Extend your reach for additional searchers

Dustin states you will see lower CPA and CPC with ASK than you will Google, Yahoo!, and MSN