Wow I found this segment to be a real worry. The speakers were all great. Hats off to them they clearly all knew their trade. The reason I found it to be a worry was that they were still talking about ad-ranking and other technical aspects of benchmarking. This is not a dig at the speakers, they were great presenters and very articulate during question time. I guess I was expecting to hear a little more about marketing metrics rather than ad ranking. Once again I would like to stress that I am not attacking the speakers here it they were presenting what most people in the room wanted to hear. I did feel as though they were all holding back a little but couldn’t quite put my finger on why. I suppose I was expecting the American market to me more advanced then Australia because it is so much bigger and what this session showed me was that it’s not that advanced at all.

As an industry we have tagged “cost per customer acquisition (CPA)” as the Holy Grail of search but it is not what we focus on when benchmarking. I have never spoken to a dot com marketing director or CEO who doesn’t want to increase market share or at least grow in line with their market but when it comes to benchmarking search we are more interested in where our ad or organic listing ranks. I have heard Chris Sherman ask the question many times at conferences “what happens when big brands start spending real advertising dollars in search?” and no one has really dared to answer. I agree with Chris that big brands will come into search in a big way and when that happens most existing advertisers are going to have to find new ways to benchmark. I predict that words like reach and frequency are going to be a lot more popular then ad rank and CPA. How we benchmark search and measure return on investment today is not robust enough to cope with what lies ahead. This is a topic of great interest to me and an area that I intend to research further. Any comments will be appreciated.

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