Just why is it called a search engine and not a find engine? Why do people google Google? Why does someone from the media write about Search? All of these are valid questions, but I will leave the first two on the roadside and concentrate on the last one. The answer is just as trivial as the other two questions: because Search is fundamentally not at all different from an advertisement driven customer journey in a well aired closed environment.

If this threw up questions, you can start wondering if Google has an answer for you.

Search engine marketing is much too complex for a well-versed ordinary person like me to handle. It is its own science, but still follows a few economic ground rules. It is all about AIDA when the journey goes from generic terms toward brand keywords. When asking myself how high I want to scale my budget, the answer is all about diminishing returns. For this, the cost for that last final sale/click/so on is the base for my future actions – and not the average. And yes, it’s also about might makes right. Whoever is more publicly known, has the best optimized website (this is where buying power is surely not a handicap) and is generally more competent, will disproportionately profit. Taken at its core, Search is advertisement ecology in a microcosm. That said, the industry I just labelled a microcosm is actually a monopolistic billion dollar business.

But this is not the end: it is not only a catch basin for generated interest through other web actions and thus close to the sale. It’s also – as described above – a complete sales funnel on its own merit. This versatility is the reason that this channel is so hard to grasp and pin onto a snazzy strategy chart.

Add to this that it is not only a good sales story from Mountain View when you are told that even non brand search engines can help advertisers. This message can be confirmed from our own in house information, because especially this source of advertisement has shown an incremental growth of capital influx for the likeable data kraken. If this helps or how much more help this provides in comparison to other media channels is something that can only be gauged on a case to case basis.

For this, the devil is in the detail: A short glimpse into online attributions often fails, in particular for multi-channel offerings with a high offline advertisements and assets such glimpses often lead to misallocation.  Only in depth, sophisticated modellings can alleviate this problem and separate the intrinsic use from incidental gains.

How will this continue in the future? People will get lazier and the search function will become increasingly mobile (android) as well as increasingly voice activated. Add to this that Google learns more from us than some of us might like. Despite this many will enjoy the more personalized search results, which will lead to increasing relevance with competing search engines. This will ultimately lead to a more target oriented phase of inspiration and that will mean good things for a further growth of relevancy this channel. Google is hardly known for standing still, which means you can already prepare yourself for future innovations.

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