IAB Report states “Site Optimization” is “Search Advertising”

Definitions of Advertising Formats

This is an interesting portion of the “IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report” (2007 Full-Year Results, May 2008). Note that the advertising format named “Digital Video” was not observed in 2006 — is this a new category?

What is Search?

If I go to hotels.com to search for a hotel, are the ads I see during that process included in the IAB’s “search advertising” format? Note the four subcategories of “search advertising” named in the IAB report (page 16 of the PDF):

Search—fees advertisers pay Internet companies to list and/or link their company site domain name to a specific search word or phrase (includes paid search revenues). Search categories include:

• Paid listings—text links appear at the top or side of search results for specific keywords. The more a marketer pays, the higher the position it gets. Marketers only pay when a user clicks on the text link.
• Contextual search—text links appear in an article based on the context of the content, instead of a user-submitted keyword. Payment only occurs when the link is clicked.
• Paid inclusion—guarantees that a marketer’s URL is indexed by a search engine. The listing is determined by the engine’s search algorithms.
• Site optimization—modifies a site to make it easier for search engines to automatically index the site and hopefully result in better placement in results.

Also, how does the IAB collect data on the amount spent for “site optimization”? Is using wordpress a “site optimization” expenditure? Why or why not?

While I’m busy asking questions, how is it that classified ads are not categorized as “search advertising”? Indeed, IMHO, the entire advertising expenditure on the Internet could be considered to be search advertising. For example: when I look at the homepage of the New York Times, I scan the page — is that not also a form of “search”?

And what about the New York Times search? Is that counted as search advertising or not? What about the search box on this blog (which is, BTW, not provided by Google)?

I feel this report raises more questions than it answers.

This entry was posted on Sun, 2008-May-18 at 08:06 and is filed under Statistics, Advertising, Commerce. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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