My first reaction was excitement and affirmation that our industry is finally here to stay.  What a great use of search marketing!

2012, an upcoming blockbuster movie starring John Cusack, Amanda Peet and Danny Glover, is said to have a $200MM budget.  Clearly Sony is expecting this movie to be a big hit.

So you could imagine my excitement when I found that not only has the entertainment community embraced search,  but a company like Sony was actively encouraging users to do research about this film by way of search.  After my moment of exhilaration, I did the following 2 things –

1. Did a search on my iphone for “2012” while I was sitting in traffic (yes, I know, texting is against the law in CA).  FAIL!
2. Once I got home, I did a search on my laptop for “2012”.  FAIL!

It was mind boggling that I could not find any listings about the movie, 2012, in the Google paid search results in wired or mobile search.  What did I find – Amazon, Ask.com and Numerologist.com?!  Forget search integration into the media mix… Sony went as far as asking users to search for them, but didn’t deliver on their expectations.  Now granted, I was able to find their listing at 12:02am but checking later in the day (approximately 9:30am), again they didn’t show up.  Which led me to the conclusion that they were thinking about paid search when Sony launched this ad campaign, but they didn’t apply enough budget to capture 100% share of voice – which is probably about $10-$20k for a few weeks.  Again, it’s a shame that Sony is willing to spend $200MM on this flick, but won’t allocate .01% of that budget to close the loop.

I was able to find the official site of the movie and thought it was poetic that they even promoted iphone apps on their site.  Again, great ideas on offering consumers what they want, but little thought to getting users to the site.  If they are prompting users to search 2012 on billboards and bus stops, why not buy a cheap link in mobile search.

I think the worst part is the advertising efforts did exactly what it intended… promote the movie and ask users to search for 2012 to extend the brand and begin a relationship with these users.  Looking at Google insights, it’s obvious the ad campaigns launched in early October.  Yet, the execution was done poorly.

I think the idea was great and give it an A.  But the effort and execution was poor and give it an F.

Here is what I learned from this experience –

• Search can work extremely well to bridge the gap between offline promotions and online engagement.  It makes it very easy for users to learn more about the product and gives advertisers a great research tool to measure the effectiveness of their offline promotions.
• This only works if you allocate enough time and thought (and budget) to close the loop.  If you do not show up when searchers are looking for you, you’ve failed.  Plain and simple.

In order to get this right, you have to work with a search specialist that will make sure all facets of an SEM campaign are built out correctly (keywords, creatives, budget allocation, bidding) so you are fulfilling the goals you set out to accomplish.

So there’s definitely a curiosity factor with Bing.  And my SEO colleagues have already given their review of the new interface and how the organic search results compare to Google.  But what will Microsoft’s huge investment in Bing mean for advertisers?

Virtually all of The Search Agency‘s SEM clients already include Microsoft in their paid search portfolio.  So we conducted an analysis of a cross-section of accounts, comparing their performance for the last three weeks of Live Search to their first three weeks with Bing.

The initial results have certainly been positive both for both Microsoft and our advertisers:

Click Through Rate (CTR) up 15%

Conversions up 6%

Conversion rate up 18%

Cost per Acquisition (CPA) down 3%

Although Bing’s search volume has increased on the heels of their aggressive advertising campaign, Microsoft has been more selective on which ads they serve on each search results page, often times electing not to serve any ads at all.  As a result, we saw a 22% drop in total impressions.  But Bing has significantly increased the relevancy of those impressions, yielding double digit growth in CTR and conversion rate.

We will be monitoring this data over the coming weeks to see if Bing can maintain this growth in search volume and conversion rates.  It’s entirely possible that this improved performance could represent the “curiosity factor” — explorers clicking on all sorts of listings to see how the new engine performs.  Either way, these early results do suggest some great opportunities for advertisers to obtain higher-converting search traffic with Bing.

What type of results are you seeing from your accounts?  How have your account management strategies changed since the launch of Bing?