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Paid Search Slow to Enter Hispanic-Targeted Sites
Search marketing is expected to reach $16 billion in 2010 -- but the tool is not yet embraced by marketers
April 01, 2006
By Mindy Charski
Search engine marketing (SEM) is exploding, but how many of those efforts at getting good visibility on Web search pages are aimed at U.S. Hispanics? Not enough, according to a just-released survey from strategy firm iHispanic Marketing Group and online publisher MarketingProfs.com.
"Search marketing toward Hispanics is underdeveloped," says Ignacio "Nacho" Hernández Jr., CEO of La Jolla, Calif.-based iHispanic, which counts Verizon and Choice Hotels among its clients.
The study sheds some light on a segment of SEM that is generally not broken down by industry studies. In January, for instance, investment house Piper Jaffray & Co. predicted money spent on U.S. searches would rise from an estimated $6 billion in 2005 to an estimated $16 billion in 2010. Those projections, however, include search in all languages.
Though on an uptick, SEM is complex. Simply put, the search engines of AOL, Google, MSN, Yahoo! and others drive traffic to Web pages, so companies are very keen to have good placement on search result pages. And there are various ways to increase the chances of such placement. For instance, companies can design their Web sites to make them more attractive to search engines, an effort called search engine optimization. They can also have short text ads with their Web address appearing above or on the side of search results. This is known as pay-per-click.
The study from iHispanic and MarketingProfs.com included 1,026 companies of all sizes, 60 percent of which said their organization has specific marketing efforts for Hispanics. It found that while more than 60 percent of respondents were using search engine optimization to reach the general market, only about 30 percent were using it to reach Hispanics.
The 2005 AOL/Roper Hispanic Cyberstudy found that nearly 12 million Hispanic adults have Internet access at home and just over 6 million have access at work. So why aren't more companies taking advantage of SEM to reach U.S. Hispanics?
"I think it all comes down to volume," says Barbara Coll, CEO of SEM agency WebMama.com in Palo Alto, Calif. "With the broadband penetration lower [among U.S. Spanish-speakers] and the comfort with the Web lower, there isn't as much activity in Spanish as in English by U.S. shoppers, thus the lower searching volume," she says.
There's a relatively slim inventory of Spanish-language content and content in English that is culturally relevant. "When you look at the content, it's a limited fraction of the potential it can be given the hunger this audience has," says Mark López, publisher of AOL Latino. "The more relevant content I can find through search ... the more I'd use search."
Though clients that jump in now could gain a first-mover advantage, today most full-service Hispanic ad agencies aren't pushing the strategy.
Offering content in Spanish is important, says Francisco Gimenez, vp of international and storefronts at PriceGrabber.com, a shopping comparison site. "The fact that [someone] is searching in Spanish means they feel more comfortable searching and reading in Spanish," he says. "Once they go to a site, if the site's content is not in Spanish, they may not continue."
PriceGrabber.com has used SEM to drive traffic to its Spanish-language site, PrecioMania.com, for the past five years.
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