Friday, October 06, 2006

Search Engine Marketing

A few days back I had doubts about the effectiveness of Google Adwords campaign. I read somewhere and had also observed this in people, that when we search for something in Google, we know that the right hand side will have sponsored links and thus don’t give it much attention. My doubt was cleared when during a recent class discussion we were told that Google makes around 90 percent of its revenues from Adwords program. This fact was validated by a recent Economic Times article, where it is mentioned that Adwords generated over 5 Billion USD in revenue, which is around 99 percent of the total revenue. One more thing that clears my doubt is the emergence of a number of search marketing firms, not just in the developed nations, where we know Internet economy is quiet developed, but also in India. In a class discussion we were introduced to Pinstrom, a highly successful SEM firm from India. More about the company can be found at its site. In the same Economic Times article I found the names of three more Indian SEM firms, Communicate2, Webchutney and Quasar media, I bet if I go a search right now I will find lots more. So what happens in SEM. I will write here what all I have understood about SEM till now, the learning is still on. An SEM firm acts as a mediator between a company who wants to advertise on Google, through Adwords obviously, and Google itself. So suppose a company X wants to place ads on Google for its products or services. It will approach an SEM firm say Y. Y will decide on the key words for which ads for X should be placed, It would make the complete Adwords campaign, which involves, text, region to which the ads have to be targeted, etc. and then signs up for it. So the ads of company X appear on Google search from a particular region (might be a country, state, city, or a smaller region), for a particular set of key words. This is SEM in a nut shell.
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This is a post from my blog about Google

1 comment:

sagar said...

hi...my name is sagar....i went through ur article it really helped me understand the current picture in marketing....hope to hear more from u on the same....thaks a lot....