Search Insider Summit: Big Agencies & Search

Search is one of the few media channels where you can spend and spend and then cut it the next day. With most media, there’s an upfront media spend. For those reason, agencies can’t look at search as the first dollars in.

Fixed budgets are money you’re putting into channels that “have to” be invested in. Flexed budgets include performance based marketing.

Regarding using search as the first place to invest in for building brand awareness, “You can’t put the search cart before the awareness horse.”

Mike gives an example of a major advertising push that resulted in a 1000% increase in search volume. Increased quality score and lowered CPC costs allowing them to compete on broad phrases without huge CPC costs compared to what they would pay if they started bidding on those terms without creating awareness through advertising first.

Restates that agencies need or are media agnostic. Not everyone needs to engage a full service agency. Agencies don’t need to manage the search campaigns, they can bring in outside search specialists to execute. Mike’s full service agency does not choose to do that though, they handle all search inside.

Mike definitely feels there’s a place for search firms in the future. Also says that in his conversaions with the search engines, that there are numerous big agencies that are doing more interesting things with search than the search agencies are.