Underlining the huge growth in spend on online advertising with the major search engines, Martin Murray, chief executive of Interactive Return, says that this year two of his clients will spend over €1 million each on search engine advertising.
Murray reports that every month he is seeing more of his clients marketing budgets being diverted away from TV, radio, print and outdoor advertising and being invested in online - and in particular search engine advertising.
Far from being online businesses only, organisations spending significant sums with Interactive Return include Government departments, financial services companies and travel agents. The big issue for those trying to sell online advertising locally is that there is no official statistics measuring internet usage or ad spend in the Irish market.
Last October a representative of the London-based Internet Advertising Bureau estimated the online advertising market here to be worth €41 million in 2006 and said it should grow to €52 million this year. An industry initiative the Joint National Internet Research (JNIR) is currently carrying out research and is expected to provide its first report to members this summer.
Despite, or perhaps because of, the lack of hard numbers for online advertising there remains a huge appetite amongst Irish businesses to harness the power of online searching. Mr Murray's firm have commissioned primary research into search engine marketing - both in terms of consumer habits and advertiser activity. The research, being carried out by Amarach Consulting, will be presented at the upcoming Search Marketing World 2007 conference in Dublin, which will feature speakers from Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft's MSN.
Recent research certainly suggests that Irish companies need to up their game when it comes to being found online. Online consultancy Amas carried out research on the websites of the top 100 Irish companies. It found that an alarming number of companies are not including basic metadata in their sites which influence how search engines find and catalogue web pages.
In the Amas study 40 per cent did not have descriptions, the explanatory text about a web page that is displayed in search results, 33 per cent did not include any keywords and 32 per cent of companies did not have either.
Search Marketing World 2007 will feature one of the gurus of the search world - Danny Sullivan. Formerly of Search Engine World but now running his own consultancy and blog under the Search Engine Land banner, Mr Sullivan has been writing about search engines and how businesses can rank more highly in consumers' searches since 1995, when as a web designer he was frustrated at the lack of available information.
Mr Sullivan believes that there is currently an over emphasis on Google and that businesses are missing opportunities with Yahoo, MSN and niche search engines specific to different industries. He also suggests that companies should consider how they rank in Google's other search engines such as its news, blogs, and image search tools.
He also advises that a mix of paid for ad placements on search engines as well as optimising sites to rank highly in search engines natural or "organic" search results is the best approach for companies to adopt.
