New Advertising in a New Medium
Now, finally, the Internet is poised to save us from irrelevant advertising.
Search advertising offers better response rates and better ways to track
whether ads are reaching the right people. Search advertising is revolutionary

in that it discards blanket advertising in favor of precise targets, controlled
costs, and meeting a pull medium on its own terms.
All Internet advertising, even the blanket type, contains an advantage over
advertising in most other media: It invites the viewer to take action immediately.
Clicking an ad takes consumers to the next step in their relationship
with the advertiser. At that next step, some type of conversion is possible —
a sale, a registration, a bookmarked site, or some other behavior that “captures”
the customer in a sense. Besides this dynamic quality of online ads,
search advertising makes four distinct and earth-shaking improvements on
blanket advertising:
Search advertising is positioned on results pages of search engines,
where the customer is looking for the advertiser. Well, perhaps the
customer is not literally looking for you, but he or she is looking for
something. The searcher is in a pulling mood — in the mood to consume
information, products, and services. If the advertiser provides relevancy
to that person’s search, the heavenly marketing match is made. And the
chance of a response is much greater than when a blanket ad wrenches
a viewer out of a passive state.
Search ads are aligned with keywords and appear on results pages
for those keywords. So, as long as the advertiser chooses keywords
appropriate to the message, and the searcher uses keywords appropriate
to the search goal, relevancy is guaranteed. Compared to the built-in
irrelevancy of blanket advertising, this degree of match-up between
advertiser and consumer is groundbreaking.
Search advertisers pay only for responses. The advertiser pays each
time a searcher clicks the ad. When that treasured click happens, the
advertiser receives a qualified lead — somebody who searched for some
combination of keywords and chose to click an advertisement that
promised relevancy as good (or better) than nonsponsored search
results. Contrast this method with the old-media system in which the
advertiser pays for sheer exposure. In the online universe, exposure
means paying for impressions — the number of times the ad is displayed,
even if nobody clicks it.
Search advertising offers detailed, multifaceted, hands-on control of
the advertising campaign. Google is particularly strong in this department.
Advertisers can micromanage their accounts, measuring performance
and enhancing their efficiency on a minute-by-minute basis. I
hasten to add that such obsessive management is not necessary in
search advertising. But the ability to control the campaign as it proceeds
represents one of the great advantages over broadcast and traditional
print advertising, in which you purchase a campaign and either it works
or it doesn’t. Tweaking, adjusting, and resculpting the campaign in midstream
to make it work is part of the search advertising system.