Search Arbitrage (I would have given it a better name) May 14
(I’m taking Master’s classes and this is another post expanding upon a topic that came up in class).
In class the other day we were talking about search arbitrage and if the practice is inherently evil. Arbitrage is an economic term describing the “practice of taking advantage of a price differential between two or more markets“.  Search Arbitrage takes advantage of the inherent difference between the cost driving users to your site using a search engine and the amount advertisers are willing to pay a site for the users viewing their ads. Taking advantage of the relevance and immediacy with which you can customize a search campaign, marketers are able to target a news story that lots of people will be interested in and deliver the traffic to the publisher’s site.
There have been several articles questioning the morality of Search Arbitrage from a customer stand-point; Search Arbitrage: Good or Evil by Catherine Seda and Search Arbitrage Issues on Search Engine Roundtable. These articles question the decline in the user experience that poor search arbitrage can lead to. Driving traffic for the sack of driving traffic is like herding buffalo off a cliff. Neither the landing page/site advertiser nor the user get the experience or the relevancy they desire. The only person who seems to benefit is the publisher from inflated page impressions.
Additionally, recent articles have criticized marketers for buying keywords associated with tragedies. While this may be considered poor taste, I don’t feel that this type of search arbitrage detracts from the user experience and instead, adds additional value to the search engines, the publishers, and the advertisers on the landing pages. Because of the redundancy and precautions taken by search engines, new content doesn’t have as much relevancy and essentially must “buildup steam” before it will begin to rank high in organic listings. It’s the marketer’s responsibility to second guess ranking and historical data and determine what consumers are really looking for. Otherwise, marketers should just let computers do their jobs. For the Virginia Tech massacre for example, search engines would have organically returned older articles, probably related to basketball or the NCAA, with the keywords “shooting” and “massacre” until the search engine algorithms would have determined that these articles were no longer relevant to consumers.
It is definitely easier for a marketer to determine that “Virginia Tech Massacre” or “World Trade Center disaster” (for that matter) are going to be high traffic keywords. However, the human element that search engine marketing offers to the equation can instantly make decisions about consumer relevancy that a computer cannot.
Popularity: 9% [?]
