Arguably one of the most used services on the Internet, search engines and companies that develop search software still have a long way to go in indexing content, since it is estimated that only 15% of the world’s information is on the Internet. After attracting users, companies are now fine-tuning their business models to monetize searches, access and the ability to generate traffic to other sites, defended the speakers at a panel at the 16th APDC Congress.
Isabel Aguilera, Google’s general manager for Portugal and Spain, aligned the company’s strategy that focuses 70 percent of its business on research, while 20 percent guarantee products around research and the remaining 10 percent focus on other areas that have a great tendency for growth.
Believing in the potential for monetizing the interests of users in search engines, Isabel Aguilera argues that companies are still unaware that we spend more and more of our lives using the Internet, compared to other media, while the advertising budget that applied in this area does not exceed 2 percent.
Google is interested in taking advantage of the great growth opportunity that resides in this area and that is why it has been refining its strategy in order to offer advertisers more direct access to its targets and the trend points to the end of the cycle, where the users search for the product they want, find it and buy from Google, a strategy already materialized in Google Check Out.
The same vision is shared by João Paulo Luz, commercial director of SAPO, who contextualizes the usage numbers of search engines and portals to the Portuguese reality. «We are very used to seeing numbers from the American audience and that does not allow us to fine-tune our strategy,» he emphasizes.
Adding the 9 percent of users who access the search, with the 2 percent who connect directly to the portals’ homepages, João Paulo Luz accounts for 11 percent of Portuguese users who start browsing these sites, and the connection to other sites depends of what is found in the search or on the portal.
«The dependence is very high in relation to what people see in the search engines or what is indicated at the editorial level by the portals», underlines the commercial director of SAPO.
The official also argued that despite the strength of the players global, search is much more of a local issue, with 70 percent of all searches done being linked to local content. “The great players global players have to tune their presence with players and that is why we believe that the Portuguese have a chance to succeed ”, guarantees
Editorial note: [18:16] The news has been updated with more information.
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