In an ideal world for internet marketing, each advertiser on internet will manage his pay per click campaigns smoothly, using great tools for keywords relevancy research, offline editors to organize his campaigns.
This looks like Google Adwords, and it is. But what about each search
engine specificity? Being very good on Europe, in the States, in
Canada, in Middle East and so on is a big specificity for each search
engine. Not to mention the captive market each search engine has
developped over the years.
No search engine can replace all of them. When an industry group
wants to become stronger, it has to develop standards and allow their
customers to work with all of them in an easy and efficient way.
Of course, being able to use easily the same campaign on different search engines
is just a beginning. After that, each campaign will be tailored, using
each search engine's own keywods research tool, to adapt efficiently to
their specific markets.
There is a market gap, in my view, in allowing advertisers to share their marketing campaigns over different search engines.
It is probably no too difficult to make a bridge between Google and
MSN, but a tool has to be developped for that. Other major stakeholders
in Internet Marketing should also allow their customers to easily import marketing campaigns, but Yahoo does not.
The idea to shrink the number of stakeholders on the advertising market looks weird to me, especially when the market is developing so much and needs so much diversity.
However, this might be a necessary step to allow diversity and quality services for advertisers.
I hope consolidation
will bring equivalent quality over services, but also stability in this
market and more tools for sharing different marketing platforms.
Any stakeholder interested in providing tools for campaign sharing over different search engines should get on the bandwagon. The need is huge and someone might be at the edge of normalization after all.