As the search industry continues to grow and become more mature and sophisticated, managing search programs becomes more challenging. According to David Roth, the Director of SEM at Yahoo, this is especially true in regards to large paid search programs.

“It just gets harder and harder every year to maintain your edge if you’re out there doing big paid search programs,” he said.

To better manage these programs, he believes that marketers should integrate their paid efforts into other campaigns such as organic, display, affiliate, and social media. In other words, he recommends that marketers view all the programs as one and optimize them as a whole.

Yahoo, for instance, had a #1 ranking for an organic listing for a brand keyword. It then purchased a paid search ad on top of it, which drove more traffic to the organic listing. Marketing efforts are, essentially, more effective when they are blended together.

Incidentally, Roth also discusses the Yahoo/Microsoft transition. His job was to transfer all of Yahoo’s advertising over to adCenter and use it to manage Yahoo. In addition, he was responsible for monetizing search results all over Yahoo. He said that both companies continuously evaluated the transition in order to ensure that the highest level of quality was being maintained.