Can paid search be an effective branding tool? There has been much discussion on this topic, and many search conferences include a panel or two on brand marketing with search.

Search Marketing, especially in the travel industry, is usually measured (or tries to measure) based on concrete conversion numbers. I spent this much per visitor, I made this much per visitor; I paid so much on a term, I had this many sales from traffic generated by that term.

Savvy search marketers have always suspected that they’re doing more for brands than click-to-buy metrics can reveal. But, those metrics are the only way we’re generally measured by the clients we serve. I suspect that as more and more traditional advertising agencies start to “do” search marketing and are courted by the major search companies, branding will become a large part of search marketing initiatives. This will be good for large companies with large budgets, but has the potential to drive up search term costs for the rest of us.

So, what is the future of branding with search? Is there a future? Yahoo! seems to think so. They’re testing a whole new set of tools and metrics to help brand advertisers use and make sense of it all.

ClickZ has a piece on the new Yahoo! tools, you can read the entire article here:
Yahoo! Testing New Branding Metrics for Search


Tagged as: Search Engines, Marketing, SEM, SEO, Online Marketing