behavioral targeting to take your search marketing program to the next level.

BlueLithium's CMO explains how to use behavioral targeting to take your search marketing program to the next level.

Search marketing is beginning to top out. We hear from agency and marketing partners that they've bought all the keywords they can buy and they're bidding as much as they can afford to bid; what else is there?

And no wonder: Keyword search ads make up only 12 percent of available online ad impressions, according to the Online Publishers Association. Contrast this with graphical ad inventory, which is exploding thanks to the growth of MySpace, blogs, video and other user-generated content.

The challenge for search marketers is to find a way to take their programs to the next level in an environment of constrained inventory and rising prices. Fortunately, a way already exists: search retargeting.

Search retargeting combines the benefits of search marketing and behavioral targeting, and is conducted by an SEM firm and an ad network working together. Visitors are driven to a landing page from a keyword search. Those who leave the site without converting receive a standard tracking cookie from the ad network. Wherever they go across that network's thousands of websites, they're served messages designed to drive them back to purchase. The same simple concept can be used to upsell those who do convert.

Data from BlueLithium Labs shows that search retargeting can improve conversions by more than 20 percent, dwarfing the cost of the incremental media buy. The ad network may even be willing to chip in the creative for free, to help the SEM avoid having to go back to the client or to the agency-of-record for banner creative.

In addition to the improving conversions, search retargeting also pumps up the marketer's share of voice (SOV). SOV is a concept near and dear to auto manufacturers and other marketers of considered purchase items. The idea is to have your brand in front of prospects for the greatest amount of time while they're in market for what you sell. For an auto purchase, that's usually eight to 10 weeks. A honeymoon vacation might be 10 to 12 weeks in the planning; a quick weekend trip might only be researched from Wednesday afternoon through end of day Thursday.

Search marketing is incredibly effective at attracting people who are actively researching, price shopping or purchasing any of these items. But you can make it work even harder by retargeting everyone you bring in through search. Additional data from BlueLithium Labs shows an average 34 percent increase in brand awareness and an 18 percent increase in intent to purchase among those who clicked on search listings and were retargeted with graphical ads as opposed to those who clicked on the same listings but saw no follow-up ads after they left the site.

The gating factor in the success of a search retargeting campaign is search marketing volume. If you're running a large scale campaign that drives thousands or tens of thousands of clickthroughs, then search retargeting is for you. If your search campaign is limited to a few dozen clickthroughs a day, then the work of getting a campaign set up will probably outweigh the benefits.

Also, you need to make sure that the CPM or CPC you're paying for the retargeting campaign are in line with your CPC keyword budget. If it's costing you $3 in retargeting charges to get back a prospect that only cost you $0.40 for the initial clickthrough, then the retargeting traffic has got to convert at nearly eight times the rate of your standard search marketing traffic to pay off.

Search retargeting is a simple, effective strategy that can help many search marketers take their programs to another level in terms of volume and bottom-line effectiveness. As with all things, make sure you test before you commit. From the examples we've seen, it should be well worth it.