NP: Sausage, Riddles Are Abound Tonight

As I get caught up on my online marketing reading list, I should be posting more on the subject here, coming as a relief to any of you who get tired of me talking about politics. Gord Hotchkiss makes a gigantic point in his Search Insider column about how search marketing is getting a much more serious look as part of the marketing mix:

Search, by its nature, isn't all that scalable. It comes with a built-in inventory limitation. You can only reach people who have raised their hand, indicating interest in something. Once you tap out that inventory, search loses its bright shiny luster. Search is effective because it's a signal for consumer intent. You can't use search to create intent where none exists.

This is one of those things I'd love to see explored analytically as more marketers start to wrap their heads around cross-channel attribution, because you've got two sides of the equation working together in many cases. On the one hand, display advertising stimulates the demand, getting people interested enough in what you're doing that they search for you online. Once they do that, search marketing captures that demand, to the point where I tend to consider brand searches -- whether paid or natural -- as a performance metric in and of itself, rather than as an acquisition channel.

What remains to be seen is just how much the search folks and the display folks communicate in order to tease apart this relationship. My sense is not much, but I may be able to test that theory in the not-to-distant future.