Quoting an Outsell study called, "Vertical Search Delivers What Big Search Engines Miss," Jason Prescott, CEO of JP Communications, said that "the average search failure rate on general search engines is 31.9 percent. This opens the field to vertical search, which is projected to earn advertising revenues of $1 billion by 2009."
Just in case you don't understand what vertical search is, it's just another way of saying specialty, targeted or niche search, with search engines built for the very purpose of this narrow focus.
There are two sides of the vertical search space for online marketers. The first is in creating a vertical search engine itself for the purpose of building communities and opportunities for targeted advertising.
The second is using existing vertical search engines to promote your products or services on.
The reason this is definitely worth looking into, especially on the second point above, is because it is a very cost effective, targeted way to get great pay-per-click results.
Most that have bought online PPC advertising, have found costs and competition increasing as general, huge advertisers simply buy up thousands of words and terms that feel is related to their strategic keywords. This basically shuts out a large amount of smaller online marketers from competing for terms that may be much more effective for them.
One example Jason gives is "for the term 'wholesale toys,' you'll see that companies like AOL and the Discovery Channel have purchased this term despite the fact that they are not wholesalers. AOL and the Discovery Channel are retail portals selling to consumers. But they'll buy every term that people use to buy toys because it brings traffic and they can afford it."
This happens all the time in pretty much every sector. Thus the attraction and power of vertical search sites.
Probably the greatest advantage of vertical search marketing is that you're almost ensured of reaching those that have a real interest in your offerings; it's the very reason they're using the service in the first place.
Because they're smaller, it also offers greater leeway in negotiating for better rates.
This is something that should really be given some serious consideration to. I would think that starting off with a smaller percentage of your marketing budget would be the way to go. Find a number of search engines that would fit into the sphere of what your products represent, and try a few out to test the results before you go on to spend larger percentages of your budget.
It won't take long to find out which ones work the best for you. I think it's a great thing right now for online marketers to enter into, as the growing dissatisfaction with general search sites is creating a market for vertical search which is give us the opportunity for very targeted advertising. The potential results, higher return-on-investment and conversion rates make this a must for the majority of us.
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