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Browser battle finds way to the Middle East advertiser's door
You wouldn't know it by looking, but every time you do a search online, there is a fierce fight going on behind the scenes.
- By Scott Shuey, Chief Reporter
- Published: 22:47 June 24, 2009
- An attendee at the Google Developer Conference in San Francisco. While search engine advertising is very competitive in some areas, it is relativelyuntapped in other areas in the region.
- Image Credit: Bloomberg News
Dubai: You wouldn't know it by looking, but every time you do a search online, there is a fierce fight going on behind the scenes.
In this fight, no one is trying to prevent you from seeing anything, per se. Instead, companies are paying money so that they'll be the first in line - or at least at the top of the page - when you search for a product or service they can provide.
"It's very difficult to get [clients] on the first page, and it's very difficult to keep them there," said Gaurav Aidasani, who is the director of Cosmos Creative Services in Dubai.
The fight to be at the top of the list is at the centre of what is called search engine advertising. Many in the industry are calling it the hottest trend in digital advertising.
There are two ways to advertise with search engines. The first, called Pay Per Click (PPC), pits advertisers again each other with the highest bidders getting their advertisements placed next to user's search results. Bid too low and your ad may not even appear on the page.
The ads only appear when a search term matches a predefined keyword chosen by the advertisers or their agency.
Every time a person clicks on an ad, the advertisers must pay the highest bid to the service provider. If no one clicks, the advertiser doesn't have to pay anything.
The three largest providers of PPC advertising on the internet are Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. Google, however, is the only one that provides targeted advertising regionally.
It has been promoting its PPC service, called Adwords, in the region for the last two years. Google has a dominant market share in search, estimated to be between 60 and 70 per cent in the US.
Yahoo has long been second in internet advertising. Currently Microsoft has only three regional networks (North America, the UK, and France) for advertising on its recently launched search engine, Bing.com.
That means that while the site can be set to include Dubai as a keyword, those ads would only appear if users were looking on one of those three networks.
The second method for advertising is called search engine optimisation (SEO), a process where someone with an understanding of how search engines work adds code to a website that will help it get a better ranking.
SEO is considered more effective as an advertising strategy, Aidasani says, with one study showing that only 30 per cent of users click on PPC ads. Most users show a preference for the "natural" results that search engine provides.
Despite that, getting advertisers locally to use SEO has been difficult.
"SEO doesn't give you immediate results, and people in Dubai don't get that," he said, adding it can take two to six months for a SEO campaign to be effective.
But people seem to be learning. Aidasani said some of his clients are already spending their entire advertising budgets on search engine advertising.
How much is being spent on search engine advertising is difficult to determine. The Pan Arab Research Centre estimates that $356 million (Dh1.3 billion) total was spend on advertising in United Arab Emirates between January and March of 2009, but only an estimated two per cent goes towards online ads.
That's still being trumpeted as triple digits growth when compared to 2007 by many in the region, including Husni Khuffash, country business manager for Google here in the UAE.
Khuffash says that about 60 per cent of advertising dollars spent online goes into search engines, but he said that figure is probably less in the region.
There are a couple of reasons behind the growth, including the ability to measure how well advertising dollars are being spent and - perhaps most importantly - because in some areas it's very cheap.
While search engine advertising is very competitive in some areas, it is relatively untapped in other areas in the region, which gives small and medium businesses a way to get their products and services highlighted on the web.
"The beauty of this is that small and medium businesses can make the best of [Adwords] for Dh100 a year," he said.
Despite the low cost of search engine ads, not everyone is sold on the concept.
Phillip Westphal, the owner of Salt and Pepper Events in Dubai, said he started using Google's Adwords on the recommendation of a college who said he was getting 30 business calls a day by using the service.
Westphal said his experience with Adwords has been relatively disappointing.
"We are not getting as many business leads as we would like," he said.
He said that he is getting about 3-4 business calls a week, but he still said it is the best way for him to advertise as it provides a way for people coming into the region to find him.
The downside he said is an unexpected rise in the number of job seekers and regional entrepreneurs who now try to contact him.
Westphal said he hasn't decided whether to keep using Google. "We'll keep it for the summer months and then we'll reevaluate."
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