What is Search Advertising and Why is it Critical for Business? |
Search Advertising, also known as Search Engine Marketing, is a totally unique medium for attracting new customers.
Advertising on Google alone will give you access to about 48% of all Internet users; adding Yahoo brings you to about 77.5%; and adding MSN gives you a total reach of roughly 86.4% of all Internet users (Source). With such a broad reach, Search Advertising is one of the most extensible forms of advertising available, with added benefits that other forms of advertising are lacking.
One of the greatest benefits of Search Advertising is the ability to accurately monitor your campaign statistics. With print or television media, you have little more than aggregate data to calculate ROI. With Search Advertising, you have detailed statistics on how many people saw your campaigns, how many clicked them, and how many of those clicks resulted in a desired action (such as a sale or a lead).
Practical example: You increased your marketing budget by 10% and gained 20% in sales. That’s great, but was it a direct result of your marketing department or could it have been influenced by another source? Wouldn’t you prefer to say, "We increased our marketing budget by 10% and gained 20% in sales; however, we’ve identified some underperforming ad campaigns and, once corrected, we should be able to get the same amount of sales for half the price!"?
Search Advertising puts you in front of the consumer both when they are actively searching for your products, and when they are oblivious to them.
Let’s say a couple is looking for a contractor to make an addition to their house. In the past, they’d probably go to the Yellow Pages; nowadays, it’s straight to the Internet. They type in “New York Housing Contractor” into Google and, voila, your ad appears. The couple sees your ad, clicks, and eventually hires you. Great!
Search Advertising also works more indirectly. Someone could be looking to buy a fishing boat, and on the side of Google they see an ad for “Secret Scented Fish Bait”. The individual, looking to buy a boat, was certainly not thinking about buying fish bait, but because of your clever ad placement, his interest was sparked and he ordered some.
Search Advertising can also increase your company’s exposure – for free. Yes, for free. As you are probably aware, people don’t always like being tracked. People also have an innate aversion to letting others profit off of them. Just as some people copy affiliate links, and remove the affiliate ID, some people copy a search ad’s link without directly clicking on the ad’s title. While this doesn’t happen frequently enough to be counted upon (that anyone knows of), a few free visitors can’t hurt.
Search Advertising is also a valuable solution in markets with extremely competitive organic search listings. Trying to rank in a top position for "web hosting" would likely require a huge budget and a high level of uncertainty. You may never see a penny in return on such a competitive keyword. Search Advertising, while not free, would enable you to at least get some visibility for this keyword.
Lastly, and probably the most exciting thing about Search Advertising, is that you might just find a gold mine, the Holy Grail of campaigns. A Holy Grail campaign is a campaign that consistently yields a positive ROI. Due to the huge reach of search engines, if you find a particular keyword that earns you $2 for every $1 you spend, you might be able to expand that campaign to $100, $1,000, $10,000, or more. Depending on your market, this could earn you a fortune.
Overall, Search Advertising is an extremely flexible form of advertising suitable for small startups and large corporations alike.
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