It’s not terrorism that the highstreet stores have to worry about, it’s people looking for them.

To blame the fall in profits from high street retail stores on July 7th seems pretty narrow minded if you ask me. When I hear people say it, I immediately hear a subtext, like they’re saying something they don’t really mean. What I hear is: The Internet. Blame the internet- blame unlimited shelf space, blame comparison shopping, blame local warehouses, blame cheaper overseas competitors and the commercial prowess of every man and his kitten with a website.

Out of interest, I recently conducted some ‘candle burning’ (my term) research into 20 major highstreet shops from famous landmarks of London. I didn’t find one shop which was using pay-per-click advertising on all major search portals to boost their revenues and protect their brand.

What I did find was Ebay ads. No matter how much bricks and mortar went into building those stores, according to the search engine ads, they could be bought and sold on Ebay. Search just about any keyword and you can find it on Ebay. Old rope really can be bought and sold on Ebay, even ‘warts and all’. And every other major high street brand can seemingly be bought secondhand.

We (“the search experts”) like to laugh and joke about the ubiquity of Ebay ads, but in light of their mega-bucks acquisition of Skype, presumably just for it’s userbase, you’d be right to thinks it is not so funny anymore. Ebay is clearly doing something right and chances are they’ve been doing something right for a very long time.

So what are they doing right? They’re bidding on ‘undiscovered’ high traffic searches for major retail shop and supermarket names. What I’m really telling you is that they’ve identified Huge Gaps In The Market. And I don’t just mean huge. I mean Mega. “Hundreds of thousands of searches a month”, huge. Ebay have identified Mega Gaps In The Market. This surely cannot be purely coincidence.

Am I right in thinking that every company director would like to identify similar gaps in the market? Even if it were online? And am I alone in thinking that no brand manager, marketing manager or even sales director, of world famous retails outlets would want to be associated with second hand goods, let alone second or third in the search listings, when people come looking for them?

Evidently not. If Ebay are able to bid on these terms, then we can say that these trademarks have not been fully protected by law, and they are fair game. By now every important company executive must know that you can pay 10 or 20 pence for every click from the search engines and you’re guaranteed a first place position in the search results. Don’t you?

Maybe everyone is thinking that they are saving themselves a tonne of money by optimising their site to naturally appear in search listings or working through affiliates. “Cos all that stuff is free or I just pay out on commissions. I win either way.”

Perhaps, but my take on this is that you’re search marketing agency just hasn’t sold you on the real benefits of paid search advertising. There’s no easy way to say this, so I’m just going to say it straight.

WAKE UP!

Pay-per-click is another word for low risk, fast turnaround, high reward marketing.

Natural search is an absurdly competitive environment that has lengthy development cycles and no guaranteed results. Investment in SEO is speculative at best and ROI does not show up until months into a deploying a website. If it doesn’t work, well that’s just it. It didn’t work. Back to the drawing board.

Add to that, the fact that natural search listings appear two listings lower- under the sponsored listings. That means everytime someone searches famous computer and electricals store, the first thing they see is Ebay.

Affiliate marketing may increase your ‘real estate’ on the page but ultimately it follows that the people searching for you by name are looking for your website specifically. Sending people to your site via affiliates is not search marketing… It’s an easter egg hunt (Incidentally, we are only 75 days away from Christmas)!

All the time that users are being sent from search engines to your brand by “I made this in dreamweaver” string and sealing wax channels, you are losing valuable marketing data about your customers online behaviour and interaction with your brand. God forbid they might shop elsewhere if you carry on like that.

Now compare and contrast that strategy with pay-per-click.

New paid search ads can be uploaded in 90 minutes to five days (depending on your provider) and directed to any website. And you still get that guaranteed top spot. Kiss goodbye to SEO development cycles. Say hello to next day ROI stats.

Paid search ads are positioned higher on the page than natural listings. They really are the first result a user is likely to see. And that traffic can be directed to ANY page you want. Kiss goodbye to random entry pages, say hello to offer testing.

Paid search ads are easy to adapt and co-ordinate in real time. Setting up Ads on search engines is so simple, they can be changed week by week or month by month. Kiss goodbye to offer updates propagating through your affiliate network. Say hello to time sensitive online marketing drives.

Let your affiliates focus on the hard stuff like getting you traffic from high traffic generic terms such as ‘christmas’. Let your SEOs focus on the hard stuff like improving the architecture and building links to your site. Whilst you Mr Marketing Manager, concentrate on what you do best, squeezing ROI from every channel. Create time sensitive offers, targeted incentives and reasons to stick to buying from you through what has been (until now) a difficult time. Get your product out there now. Put funds into pay-per-click and you’ll still be paying on delivery, even when Santa arrives.