This article/ series has been written for students intersted in Internet Marketing, and inquizzitive brains who want to learn about search marketing methodically and not as a quick and dirty way to make money. It begins with the very basic of search marketing and goes on to explain it in detail. For feedback, please feel free to contact me.
A brief history of Search
Search has been integral to life since our very beginning. Animals and nomads searched for food. Later, we searched for shelter. Much later, we searched for new lands. We searched for elixir of life. We search for life on new planets. In our day to day lives we search for directions to a friends house, we search for an apartment, we search for better restaurants, better jobs and the likes. The bottom line is everyone needs and information and the only people who get it is who search for it.
Some smart people realized that search is essential to mankind and started facilitating search services. They became messengers who got gold from kings, great discoverers, media giants, business tycoons, and Larry and Sergey. Let us call these smart people are search masters.
With advancement in technology came a communication revolution and finding information became easier. One could now call up a directory service or read a Yellow Page. Some more years went by and then came another wave of this revolution called the Internet.
Yellow Pages, Call Directories made money by placing ads or information in prominent position. People who placed ads made sales or used these mediums to spread awareness about their business. A classic example of Search Marketing.
With Internet rules of the game changes. Searching for information was made a lot easier. I can now just go to my favorite search engine and find information. The new age facilitators of information are the search engines such as Google, Yahoo! Search, and Microsoft Live. I like to call them GYM (read gymStory.) The search engines attracted millions of users who were searching for information everyday, every second. Marketers took some time to realize this, but once they did understand the phenomena, they wanted their businesses, product or services to be easily discoverable. They created websites and submitted them for inclusions. They designed their content in such a way which was appealing to their users. But, this was not good enough. Marketers were not operating in isolation. Their competitors, even customers – both potential and exisiting were sharing their view of about their products and services. The information was sometimes skewed, fraudulent in nature, or negative for the business. It was hard for them to surface up their official information and channel it to their end users because of the organic nature of the search engines.
Goto.com was amongst the very first to realize this. They came up with a business model via which in exchange of a certain amount of money advertisers and marketers can display an ad on the search engine results page or more commonly called as SERP in the industry. It was a hufe success. It triggered Yahoo! to act and they bought Goto.com which was now called Overture. Next wave of revolution came with Google Search. Google was a huge success because of its patented PageRank algorithm which used to index search engine listing on the basis of popularity of a certain website. As Google grew they came up with a business model simmilar to that of Overture – show ads next to search engine results and make money. It was a win-win situation for both Google and Marketers.
Business Models
Essentially, search engines operate on two business models:
1. CPC or Cost Per Click – It is the amount which an advertiser has to pay a search engine when a user clicks on their ad being show on search engine results page.
2. CPM or Cost Per Impression – It is the amount which an advertiser pays for every thousand impressions on the search engine result page.
More recentl model which came into picture is called CPA or Cost Per Action where an advertisers pays a search engine only when a certain action is completed.
Overtime the search engine marketing has got more sophistacted and search engines now offer features like demographics targeting, location, targeting, language targeting etc. I’l discuss them in the next part of this series.
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