The Human Factor – Search Advertising

There is something inherently wrong with the way that search engine marketing is set up to work. Namely, the fact that keywords are the unit of measurement has limited the potential for scalability and efficiency, which affects profitability at the end of the day.  There seems to be no way to move past the fact that at some point, a human being managing keywords – the search marketing manager – becomes the limiting factor. The original technology that made paid search so valuable to advertisers has not come too far since its inception, and that lack of innovation may lead to display advertising overtaking search spend by 2015 as reported by eMarketer.

Managing keywords is fine when you have a few keywords, low competition, or minimal changes to make over time. While this may work for small advertisers, this poses a significant problem for advertisers running large campaigns with tens to hundreds of thousands, or even millions of keywords.  But such can be the reality for online retailers who have tens of thousands of products and exponential SKUs to cover.

The Need for Evolving Tools

At any point in history, when humans were faced with a need for increased efficiency and effectiveness, they have built tools to help them. Take farming: hand tools were replaced by horse-driven plows, which eventually led to John Deere’s complete suite of products. The evolution of these tools led to greater efficiency and effectiveness for agriculture.

So where are we in the search advertising industry? Current technology is really only designed to operate at the keyword level, so all we’ve done is innovate on the AdWords tool – the original ‘hand tool’ of search advertising. As with hand tools in agriculture, you are still limited by the work that one person can do over time.

Breaking Away from the Human Factor

Inevitably, people will find a way to break away from human factor limitations, in search as they did in agriculture. They will do this by developing tools that multiply their impact, thereby creating a one-to-many relationship between people and their work. Existing tools that operate at the keyword-level are becoming outmoded for large campaigns, and do not address the big problems facing companies heavily invested in paid search advertising:

• Over time, the subjectivity of search engine marketing best practices – from campaign structure to keyword strategy and ad copy selection – will lead to campaigns that resemble Dr. Frankenstein’s monster. And be just as agile.
• Advertisers’ lack of institutional knowledge about their search engine marketing campaigns will inhibit them from increasing performance.

Just like a tractor helps a farmer cut more rows, plant and fertilize, search engine marketing will evolve its tools, allowing them to act on many keywords at one time, thus removing the human factor and allowing them to scale their capacity to manage millions of keywords with the same human resources. Just like farmers, it will still be necessary to get dirty from time to time, but a search engine marketer’s productivity will be exponentially improved with the advent of such tools.