However, for traditional brand companies the linkage is a bit harder.  Generally speaking, search engines aren’t used to look for low involvement products like potato chips or cleaning products.  Brand marketers are used to metrics like reach, frequency, recall and brand awareness.  Search uses things like clickthru and total impressions.  How does one translate the metrics?

This was the topic discussed at a panel at Advertising Week.  The bottom line for me is the inherent differences in the media and campaigns.  Search is active.  Old media is passive.  One is pull, the other push.  

There’s a great value in search for brands if they think about the mentality of a searcher.   People are unlikely to search for Tide, but they might search for cleaning tips.  The top sponsored listing when I completed this search was for Tide.  By providing this information for the searcher they present themselves as the expert on the topic.  It’s not selling product at that very moment, but it will sell it in the future, just like typical TV ads.

Key words that are being used can be seen as well.  This can be seen by using google trends or other keyword tools.  Used well, it can reveal patterns that would otherwise be unnoticed, as a sort of outside in market research.

A quick look at the google zeitgeist can be pretty informative.  Take this example from Sept 22.  #36 is “bank of america website down” as people tried to access the site when it was down for five hours during the working day.  Even worse given the general financial malaise going on currently.  This might have been an opportunity for competitors, or news organizations to fill in the gap of information.  Today’s #35 search is for coldstone creamery.  Apparently they are giving away free ice cream this evening, so its presence is indicative of the effectiveness of their campaign.