Big Shake-ups In The Pay Per Click Ad World

An article by Buzz Internet Staff    No Comments

These past few weeks have seen a flurry of announcements and studies shake PPC advertisers and publishers a like and have left many wondering what the future will hold for one of the most common and effect digital marketing tools available. This is a huge concern for anyone involved in the digital marketing realm as we all use PPC to some extent and it has always been an extremely reliable marketing tool for Toronto business marketing.

The first major concern comes from the ongoing saga of an increasing number of major publishers pulling out of the standard ad exchanges in favor of starting their own private, invite-only ad exchanges. The most recent, and arguably most devastating from a Toronto business marketing point of view, publisher to make this move is the venerated Wall Street Journal. This past week the WSJ announced the creation of their own premium ad exchange called the WSJ Audex which will provide full PPC services to the Wall Street Journal site and other Dow Jones owned companies. But as we said, this isn’t just a sing publisher making this move, WSJ is simply the most recent example as Hearst Magazines, Condé Nast and others have already made this move making it significantly more difficult to get a small business in front of the large scale traffic that these publishers are able to offer.

The second and possibly larger concern is the vast knowledge gap between reality and perception among both marketers and publishers when it comes to implementing Real Time Bidding (RTB) features. Marketers and publishers both tend to be the outgoing type of people who prefer to do their business person to person and they are afraid that RTB ad purchasing will remove that relationship from the business. A recent study showed that 84% of publishers are afraid that RTB will lead to commoditizing and devaluation of their ad inventories and three out of four respondents were afraid that the automated competition for ad space would lead to deteriorating relationships with their customers.

Both sides are going to need to come together and reach an understanding of each other’s concerns if RTB is ever going to gain ground as the primary method of purchasing digital advertising space. If this doesn’t happen soon, Toronto business marketing experts, including those of us at BIMG, are going to have to scramble to find a way to make up for the lost traffic generation and it won’t be easy.