The future of search.. mobile.
February 1st, 2008 samMobility is the future of search. In my experience, there seems to be two camps of thought right now when it comes to the future of the internet and hence - search. I am however strictly of the opinion that the future is clearly mobility. I have not made that argument lightly however, I planned to specialise in this corner of search personally, but the alternatives do not appeal to me anywhere as much after viewing some of the performance statistics of the mobile campaigns.
One camp argues that the future of search marketing and the internet in general is a merging with television. I can see this happening to a certain extent, although the strength of search from the television I believe to be negligable. Entertainment will make the shift to a digital distribution, in the form of pay per view high definition video, free view (youtube style) steaming video and straight downloadable free and subscriber content. It is not a question of if but of when, for many - this is already happening with technology such as xbox media center, PVR and divx multimedia players. The internet and television have been linked to some extent, directly, for sometime. Certain betting services have seen reasonable return with interactive television services - but they never really achieved market saturation. I’m unsure as to how search will operate within the realm of the television screen, mainly because I think it is crippled without a full keyboard.
Mobile phones suffer from the same problem as the television, they have a limited text entry due to the predictive text constraints. Most people are unlikely to entire more than a single word, which will make competition for the search platform extremely competitive. I do still believe, however, that the future is mobile. Even in, what is definitely still its infancy, mobile phone campaigns for certain economic verticals on the Yahoo mobile beta platform (MRC) see in excess of 20% conversion rates. Once people become more aware of these numbers, then the market will slowly become more and more saturated and much more competitive. However, due to the restrictions of the beta platform at present the competition is extremely low - so get in there now if you can.
Imagine walking into a shop and trying on a pair of shoes, they fit perfectly and you’re about to buy. Just before you do you key into Google the barcode or make and model and find the size and make for sale online for 20% cheaper. In my opinion, that will be the next type of online affiliate website, in the same vein as the current spattering of ‘coupon’ websites.
So, which are the big keywords currently? Well - mobile advertising currently appears to be mimicking the early state of paid search particularly from the overture platform. Adult and gambling content are the current big hitters - but this will change. Mobile related content performs extremely well in my experience, although the volumes are not particularly high - around 50-60 sales a day at the most. This will grow though there is absolutely no doubt.