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New Study Assesses Impact of Search Engines on Buying Guide Segment of B2B Advertising Industry

New Study Assesses Impact of Search Engines on Buying Guide Segment of B2B Advertising Industry

The entire advertising marketplace is in a state of flux caused by the search engines' introduction of pay-for-performance advertising programs, according to a just-released study from InfoCommerce Group entitled "Online Buying Guides: Making Sense of What's Happening Now."

President and Founder of InfoCommerce Group Russell Perkins said, "If the advertising and publishing communities told us anything during this research, it's that advertiser preferences and the competitive environment have been altered forever."

Among the study's key findings are:

  • What really excites advertisers is not Pay for Performance (PFP) itself, but one of its key manifestations: shifting advertising risk from the advertiser to the publisher.

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  • Advertisers cite PFP as being "more fair," and this leveling of the playing field is what is driving the growth of PFP.
  • A large majority of advertisers (71 per cent) consider publisher- generated performance reporting to be important, while the exact same percentage of publishers (71 per cent) deliver no advertiser reporting at all.
  • Rather than stress the quality of their audiences - something that advertisers are increasingly willing to consider as part of their ad buying - publishers continue to sell largely (62 per cent) on the basis of their overall site traffic, generally a losing strategy since vertical B2B sites rarely generate impressive traffic.
  • Only a tiny group of buying guide publishers (4 per cent) currently offer a PFP option

    • Perkins emphasized the disconnect between how publishers are selling themselves and what advertisers consider to be valuable. The study identifies four sales strategies publishers can use to sell more effectively in this new environment.

    Other topics covered within the ICG study include:

    The study contains results of the largest-ever survey of print and online buying guide advertisers and captures their attitudes towards buying guides and their advertising objectives. It also includes exclusive, in-depth interviews with publishers of a diverse group of buying guides who tackle head-on the challenges they face.

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