Management is all about taking the right decisions and ensuring that they continue to be right.

I really don’t care how good or bad this definition is. This is something I coined and I am proud of it. Copyrighted

This article/ series has been written for students interested 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.

Part 2 continues from where we left, discussing and talking a little bit more about the three Cs of SEM:

• CPC – Cost per Click
• CPM – Cost per Thousand Impression
• CPA – Cost per Action or Cost per Acquisition

CPM was the model on which the advertisement on search originally started and was followed on for quite some time, until in 2002 Google AdWords evangelized the CPC model. Until now, the advertisers used to pay for impression even if it doesn’t translate into any traffic to their website. While, the CPM model was a great way for marketers who were doing a branding exercise to reach as many eyeballs as possible, it was not well suited for the ROI conscious advertisers who wanted traffic on their website.

CPC was the solution and it was adopted widely. Even today, CPC is the most commonly used medium of bidding on keywords on a search engine. CPA is relatively new and is being explored as an option by many marketers.

How do I start a search engine ad campaign?

Before you start a search engine campaign there are several things that an marketer need to define. They can be easily documented by answering the following questions:

To understand your own competency:

• What is the USP of my product/service?
• Is this USP highlighted on my website?
• What keyword(s) defines my product/ service?
• Is my product/ service seasonal?

To understand your customer:

• Where does my customer live(s)?
• What languages(s) does my customer speaks?
• What is his age group, and gender?
• If a consumer were to search for a product/ service that I offer what keywords will he search for on an engine?
• What kind of messaging he would be interested in?

To understand your marketing objectives:

• Do I want to promote my product/service or do I want to sell it?
• Do I want just traffic on my website or do I want them to complete an action (fill a form, make a purchase etc)?
• What is my cost per acquisition? How much I am willing to spend for a particular action?
• Does this cost justifies the ROI?
• For how long do I need to advertise?
• How much I will invest in advertisement?

By answering these questions what you are doing is pretty much creating two persona’s:

• User persona – Persona of the search engine user who is potentially interested in your product/service.
• Brand (product/ service) persona – How does your product/ service looks like.

Advertising is nothing but creating an engagement between these two personas. Once a user starts engaging with your brand, the purpose of advertisement is achieved. Now based on how you have created or designed this engagement, this user will either become your customer or will leave your door (website.)

All said, if you’ve answered these questions clearly you pretty much have all the information to kick start your search engine campaign. In the next part, I will discuss about the various search engine’s offering and step by step process to create an account and start your first campaign.

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.