Companies that buy search advertising may be flushing away part of their budgets as they bid on brand keywords they probably don't need.
Adweek report cited Microsoft-backed research by its Atlas Solutions group into brand spending. Atlas suggested marketers waste about half of their budgets buying keywords that they don't need.
"What you're really paying for is a glorified Yellow Pages listing," Young-Bean Song, VP of analytics for Atlas, said in the report. Atlas studied 30 campaigns reaching some 120,000 people on Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft.
They found almost half of the clicks on ads were from previous advertiser website visitors. Also, about 60 percent of visitors arrived from branded keyword ads for company names or products, while 29 percent came from generic searches where paid search is expected to perform.
Atlas had been working on their survey before Microsoft declared it would acquire aQuantive, Atlas' parent firm. Song also said they weren't being critical of Google, but highlighting an issue for advertisers.
Google has enjoyed a dominant position in search advertising, but it permits bidding on competitor keywords as long as they don't show up in the text of an ad. That combination likely contributes to the spending issues cited by Atlas.
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