AdMedia Explores Search Engine Advertising Options Beyond Google
While Google continues to dominate the paid search landscape, marketers who dedicate the lion’s share of their digital marketing budget to Google are likely diluting their investment value. With an extremely saturated marketplace resulting in the need to bid aggressively in order to gain top ad positions on SERPs, more and more marketers are veering into a point of diminishing returns
AdMedia, a digital marketing provider in California, explains your advertising options on search engines beyond Google.
Why Do Companies Want To Branch Out Beyond Google?
While Google has arguably the best database and searching capabilities among all modern search engines, there are reasons why many marketers are branching out and testing new traffic sources. This helps mitigate risk, reach an incremental audience, and see better ROI, especially on non-brand or competitor keywords. On top of that, Google is notorious for privacy issues across their suite of products, and many users prefer to keep their search information private.
Branching out beyond the major search engines like Google enables a marketer to reach a different segment of their audience, giving their ads better depth of performance across the Internet as a whole.
Here is a high level breakdown of search alternatives outside of Google -
Bing
Bing is no stranger to the paid search landscape as they control a 23 percent share of the total volume of online searches.
While Bing emerged as a replacement for Microsoft’s MSN Search functionality just over a decade ago, it’s unique approach to SEM quickly disrupted the paid search landscape.
With a dedication to user experience and partnerships with Linked In, compatibility and tools built on the MS Suite stack and a brain trust focused on product and platform innovation, Bing Ads has secured it’s position as a credible competitor to Google Ads
Yahoo!
Verizon Media purchased Yahoo! and AOL in the past few years, while maintaining their focus as a “content engine”, positioning themselves not only as a viable search engine, but as a discovery site whose homepage has a dedicated following tied to customized content tied to user profiles.
Yahoo partnered with Microsoft with the rollout of Bing, where the latter powered paid and organic search for the former, but the early stages of this partnership resulted in Yahoo owning the relationships with premium Enterprise search marketers, a testament to their white glove approach to sales and account management.
In recent years, Yahoo rolled out the Gemini platform, a key marketplace focused on both paid search and native advertising. This allowed search marketers to streamline their search efforts into a nascent channel that provided lower funnel performance efficiency and incremental reach for digital marketers
Niche Search Engines
These search engines are targeted toward segments of the Internet audience. They can be useful if your client is trying to market to a highly specific demographic or interest group.
Swisscows
Swisscows is a family-friendly search engine. Parents can be assured that all of their results are appropriate for children. This site can be useful when targeting companies that sell children’s products, as well as products and services that could be useful to parents of small children.
DuckDuckGo
DuckDuckGo is well-known for its privacy policy. It does not collect or store users’ personal information. The site is a good fit for companies whose customers are privacy-focused.
Ekoru
Ekoru is a search engine meant for people who are environmentally conscious. The site uses only renewable energy in its data centers and does not store search or user-related data on its servers. The company donates 60 percent of its revenue to charities dealing with reforestation, climate action, conservation, and animal welfare, among other causes.
Search 2.0
Apart from the aforementioned major and niche search engines, there are many ad tech and media companies that operate in paid search outside of the primary engines. These companies utilize category endemic site search that extends beyond Google and Bing and their corresponding partner networks. Companies such as AdMedia have owned and operated properties that provide incremental paid search reach without cannibalizing digital marketing efforts on the major engines.
As the digital landscape continues to evolve, more marketers are allocating their budgets to these sources to diversify their efforts and reach incremental users while benefiting from much more cost effective media than what they are paying on Google.
To learn more about AdMedia and similar alternatives to the engines reach out to our expert team at info@admedia.com
