A bloggers view on search in Europe: Peter Young

Peter Young's view on Search in Europe

As someone who wasn't actually born within Europe, I guess the European angle interests me more than most. Combine this with an almost obsessive interest in search, and you get an understanding of why I am so interested in being involved with the SearchCowboys.

Europe is different from many other markets. For one, Europe is a diverse but collaborative market. Whilst one might argue that search marketing in the US focuses not just on English speakers but also on the Hispanic market (Spanish), there is no doubting that Europe is a far more complex beast from this perspective, with issues such as geo-targeting, country specific localisation and if we throw in countries such as Switzerland and/or Belgium the added complexity of targeting multiple languages as well.

To just add to the complexities we all have our own little preferences. Whilst much of Western Europe is very much Google-centric, markets such as Russia do not experience the /'Googleopoly'/. Such differences in search engine preference also manifest themselves in terms of user behaviour. Whilst Europe has one of the largest markets in terms of potential searchers, they conduct more searches per search than nearly any part of the world including more mature markets such as the US.

With such a huge target market potentially available it is no wonder that search is now on many European advertisers agendas. In 2007, web advertising in Europe was worth 11bn euro, of which two-thirds of that was spent in the big three - namely the UK, Germany and France. Of the 11bn euro spend, nearly half could be attributed to Search spend according to figures from Forrester. It is also indicative of how far search has come in Europe that many forecasters are still forecasting considerable growth in Europe for online marketing (driven very much by search) during 2009 22.9% according to Carat, driven by the advancement of broadband and e-commerce throughout Europe.

From a personal perspective, I believe that Europe will see search mature over the next couple of years, with mainland Europe catching more mature markets such as the UK. With the current economic client, decision makers are more and more concerned with accountability, something which online is able to provide to a certain extent, and as such there is a belief by many within the industry that Search will stay fairly recession proof (in comparison to other markets) over the next couple of years.

However there are still limitations. Many European and Global campaigns are either disparate, decentralised affairs or 'one brush' affairs resulting in limited visibility within target markets, or cannibalisation of strategy from within. This can be a result of various individual geographic stakeholders or a one size fits all approach, something which given the afore mentioned complexities can result in fragmented visibility, lack of targetting and potentially a campaign that is not able to feed itself (ROI wise) - ultimately not something any advertiser is going to want in such trying times. To get the best out of any European search campaign - it is worth taking the time to understand your target markets, what makes them tick and their individual differences.

Search in Europe is an exciting place to be at the moment. It offers a challenge to search marketers not rivaled anywhere else in the World - Why would I want to swap anything for that?