Digital Marketers Bank on Search Engine Results
Advertising is increasingly going digital, and two Long Island companies are in the middle of a fast-paced world some say is revolutionizing the ad industry.
This new order doesn’t have Madison Avenue as its epicenter. Instead the focus is the search engines of the World Wide Web, with Google, Yahoo and Microsoft’s MSN.com, being the most dominant.
Digital marketers like Prime Visibility in Melville and Didit in Rockville Centre help clients gain prominence for their products or services. Their objective matches that of traditional ad agencies. But the methods in the new media couldn’t be more different.
The digital agencies seek that prominence by taming the pecking order of search engine results. Some high-tech experts estimate as many as 90 percent of computer users get to a Web site via search engines. And the higher the ranking of a company’s site on what a search engine spills out, the more likely users will go to that site.
Prime Visibility is a 10-year-old search-engine optimization company, a clunky description for a company that uses analytical methods to come up with the keywords that allow companies to reach potential customers without the use of paid advertising. Prime Visibility then bids on the words through a search engine and strategically places them on the company’s Web site to push it up "organically," or naturally, among the listings that appear after a Web search. About 15 percent of its business involves paid ads.
Lawyer Andrew Hazen, the company’s founder and chief executive, said clients like search advertising because the digital agencies can track the effectiveness of their clients’ Web site. They can track traffic, what sites customers are coming from and what keywords are being used.
"Newspapers can’t do that," Hazen said.
The chief operating officer of one client praised Prime Visibility. "They were very successful in getting us top ranking on all the major search engines," said Douglas Cooper, chief operating officer of Lauren Hutton, a Manhattan company owned by the veteran model.
Prime Visibility is a fast-growing business: Its revenue more than doubled in a year, from $2 million in 2006 to $5 million in 2007, Hazen said.
Spending for paid searches jumped to $8.9 billion in 2007, a 28 percent rise from the year before, and it’s expected to rise 24 percent to $11 billion in 2008, according to JupiterResearch, the Manhattan-based technology research firm. Google is the leading search engine for paid search advertising.
Didit is a 12-year-old search-engine marketing company that places and monitors ads for clients, again through the use of keywords.
In this part of the paid-search market, the search engines charge marketers based on the number of times computer users click on a company’s advertising, a concept called pay per click. The prices generally range from 50 cents a click to $1.50, said Gerry Bavaro, Didit’s vice president of client services.
The digital agency is paid a percentage of what the company pays overall for clicks, he said. "The spending is in line with what our clients are getting in returns [on their] investments," Bavaro said.
Last fall Didit took on an Internet ad campaign for Brookstone, the specialty and gift retailer with 300 stores nationwide. The Merrimack, N.H., retailer wanted to build sales for its anti-snoring pillow, Sona Pillow.
"Didit built out a massive keyword campaign around it," said John Lucey, Brookstone’s Internet marketing manager, "and it played a part in making that one of our top-selling products."
Bavaro said the company, which has 100 employees, estimates that its 2007 revenue grew 15 percent from $23 million in 2006. The company has won several honors for its explosive growth in the past five years, including being ranked third on Deloitte’s list of the 50 fastest-growing technology companies in New York State.
Both companies predict they will continue in a growth mode despite the economic downturn because of the immediacy of search advertising.
"We’re almost recession-proof," Bavaro said.