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When I started in this business (internet marketing) 15 years ago, what I heard over and over again was how great it was that you can measure EXACTLY what happens with your ads online, not just that someone “saw” the ad. This still holds true. My customers know everything about their ads: when, where, how often it appeared and how often it was clicked as well as what happened when the “clicker” got to their website. Then we layer on top of that how much that click cost and how much we spent in total and we have a very clear picture of how much it cost to get that customer there. Not just some abstract notion of “someone saw the ad and that’s valuable branding”.

Don’t get me wrong, branding is great and we do try to dominate the top of the page with natural search and PPC for exactly that reason. BUT, it’s all measurable and that’s the point to be made for online advertising. We’re not just trying to get clicks… we’re trying to get targeted, relevant clicks… clicks that actually convert.

I’d love to focus on impressions as a metric. I can buy tons of those and never get a click, but hey… I got lots of eyeballs on my ad. It’s easier not to have to prove your work actually produced results (read sales or leads or whatever the customer needs) but that’s not the big promise of the web. The big promise is measureability and a demonstrable ROI.

So, don’t let some big agency tell you that you shouldn’t focus on click-throughs and most importantly, what comes after the click. Don’t let them take you back to a time when they waved their hands in front of your face and told you to “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!” Insist on real, measureable results and your bottom line will thank you!

As to the falling click-through rates… I would say to my fellow marketers, if click-through rates are falling, then lets look at the ads, the placement, the keywords that we choose, fixing the landing pages, etc. This is “new media” we’re working in, we have to invent it as we go along and keep remaking it. Throwing up our hands and reverting to old media metrics isn’t going to stop progress, it just makes us look bad.

And while I’m at it, the search engines aren’t off the hook either. They need to look at WHY people aren’t clicking anymore. Is it placement of the ads, the brevity of the ads, do they need to ad small graphics? They have more data than all of us and have a far bigger stake in getting it right, so where are they in all this?

My final thought is that I’m doing this for my customers and they deserve my best effort. Isn’t that what we hope every marketer and every publisher is doing too?

I just don’t think that there’s enough different about Bing to really grab people and make them avid Bing users. Also, there’s the comfort factor. I am comfortable with where everything is at Google and don’t want to have to search for similar features on Bing. Not to mention Google gives me good, relevant, useful results.

As the InformationWeek article states, MS will have another big advertising push when they release Windows 7 later this month and I predict that there will be another slight bump for Bing, followed by a similar slump. They are going to have to really work on the product to differentiate it and make it something unique and useful to gain market share. Being “just another Search Engine” isn’t going to cut it.

As I mentioned last month when Bing gained 3%, it’s early (only 2 months data) and the numbers don’t show a real trend yet. We’ll have to wait and see how it all settles out over a few more months.

I’m appalled at what has happened at Yahoo over the last couple of years. They’ve lost their direction and have squandered away the lead they had in the industry. It’s sad and its wrong in a lot of ways… mostly for their shareholders.

If you’re interested in the real history of Yahoo and how they built their search business, Danny Sullivan has written a story about it here complete with some early 1998 TV ads from the search engines of the day.

I like the idea of making one ad buy that gets me both Yahoo and Bing, it just makes management easier for the 25% – 30% that isn’t Google. But, I’m not sure I like the idea that there are really only two search engines of importance from a natural search standpoint. It will be interesting to see how they roll that out. Will Bing simply take over Yahoo SERP’s or will there be a mixing of the two?

Also, how do we SEO’s deal with them? An 800 lb. gorilla (Google) and a 600 lb. gorilla (Yahoo, Bing hybrid)?