Hello, search engine marketers. This one’s for you. Media traders, you may like this, too.

There is no question that search engine marketing is a lucrative field that positions marketers as gatekeepers to the bottom of the digital purchase funnel for clients. Whether through organic listings using search engine optimization (SEO) techniques or through pay per click (PPC) advertisements that ride along side the organic listings, both capture a critical moment of intent – and “intenders” are valuable, obviously.

With the hoopla around the launch of Google DoubleClick’s AdX 2.0 ad exchange, the display advertising opportunity will come into focus as the next tactical overlay for search engine marketer (SEM) strategy.

For most SEMs, Google’s search platform is the primary obsession these days as it easily eclipses the traffic of Yahoo’s soon-to-be-shuttered search engine and Microsoft’s Bing. Consequently, core to the function of the SEM is managing their rankings or positions in Google’s organic results or paid listings for keywords and keyword phrases.

With coming innovations in exchanges including AdX and Right Media, I’ll suggest that another function can be managing their “display rankings,” if you will, within Google’s organic search rankings and leveraging the bottom of the funnel opportunity. The math will be complex. Huge, depending on the scope of a campaign. But there’s going to be big opportunity to those who wade in – and if someone, such as Google or Clickable, can come up with an easy for the masses to access the “display ranking” opportunity and search together, this could be a game changer for the smaller, long-tail marketers who help drive Google AdWords today.

And publishers, you benefit, too, due to increased liquidity or bidding on your inventory – as in higher CPMs. Ch-ching.

Let Me Example You

For organic or non-paid listings, after a keyword phrase has been entered, there will usually be 10 results on the search engine result page (SERP). Each result may lead to a page with a prominent, display advertising placement. This is particularly true when links to late-breaking, current events and articles rise up in the search index in the first day or two after publish – large media publishers often have graphical display which will become increasingly biddable in real-time. I’m sure there are other similar scenarios that SEMs can divine, too.

As SERP listings are subject to change in a moment’s notice, having a real-time understanding of the SERPs and the biddable display advertising behind them becomes the next opportunity to touch the “intender” at significantly increased scale – if SEMs want it.

More Good News

It was recently announced that AdSense is opening up to buyers from “certified” ad networks, which is another way of saying that demand-side bidders on Google’s DoubleClick ad exchange will be able to bid on Google content network placements which contains boatloads of Long Tail inventory including plenty of “premium”, home page, niche inventory. Even better will be bidders’ ability to leverage AdX’s suspected (but yet to formally launch), real-time bidding features and coming real-time features that are likely to be a part of Right Media.

The more biddable display becomes on the Web, the bigger the opportunity for SEMs and smart media traders who can leverage their knowledge of the search engine result page with the display “easter egg” behind it to capture a key moment of consumer intent – all in real-time.