Research answers to search marketing

Taken at face value, search marketing - paying search engines to send visitors to your Web site - seems highly competitive when compared to the medium it most closely resembles - outdoor advertising (billboards).

Compare search marketing and outdoor advertising, and search marketing seems to offer two tremendous advantages: You prequalify your prospects and you pay only for people who actually look at your Web "storefront."

When you buy outdoor advertising - billboards - you pay primarily based on street or highway traffic counts, which are extrapolated into a count of how many people are exposed to your ad message. You can't know, for sure, how many people will really look up and see your billboard, and you don't really know whether they had, at the time, the faintest interest in what you have for sale.

When you sponsor search results on a search engine, you get a report of how many "impressions" you receive, but you don't pay for them. You pay only for those people who actually click on your "billboard" and look at your site.

Imagine outdoor advertisers agreeing to charge you only for people who saw your billboard and then, as a result, actually drove by your business and looked at the advertising you had posted on your storefront. That's what search marketing amounts to.

Because it appears that search marketing offers a ganga deal compared with outdoor, people who spend ad dollars should know the basics of how search marketing works. First, you sign up with Google, Yahoo!, MSN, etc., decide how many dollars you want to spend per day and what words you want to participate in as a sponsored search.

Again, you only pay if someone sees your sponsored link and actually clicks on your link to visit the page you want them to see - say it's a page about this weekend's tire sale, coupon included (for free alignment).

How much you pay depends on the search words you want to buy into. The first problem/challenge you'll discover in search marketing is choosing search words. If your search words are say, "tires Tucson" and you want click-throughs only for people in Tucson, you might pay $1.50 for each click-through. At that rate, if you spent $5,000 a month, you would pay for 3,333 hits on your site per month. Outdoor ad sales reps would quickly point out that 3,333 hits is a tiny number compared with the tens of thousand of "prospects" who will see your billboard every day.

On the other hand, at best it's difficult, at worst impossible, to measure how many tires that outdoor advertising actually sells in a month. Search marketing, however, could give you precise measurements. Using your own hit report software, or better yet, using Google's free hit report software, Google Analytics, you can determine, for example, exactly how many coupons were printed out as a result of your 3,333 click-throughs. Then you can design these coupons (assuming you could use coupons) so that, at the end of the month, you have a specific count of how many people actually bought (for example) tires and used your "search marketing" coupon for a free alignment.

Each day, or week, you could count the coupons, look at those sales, and determine whether the $166.66 a day ($5,000 a month) you are spending is worth it. If not, maybe next week you try a different search term, such as "tires, everything's included."

Whereas your outdoor advertising will be up for the whole month, or more likely 3-12 months, you may be tempted to spend your search marketing dollars day by day. Pick a hot search phrase and you might get all your click-throughs in an hour. The instant your daily click-through money is spent, your sponsored link does not appear for the rest of the day.

In the end, even a comparison to outdoor advertising fails, however. Outdoor advertising is primarily about building name awareness, which search marketing may struggle to do. Then, too, search marketing isn't geographically directional, as is "Take Exit 274; go two miles."

Still, search marketing offers a direct measurement of hits, coupons printed out, coupons used, and in the case of an online store, sales tied to search marketing dollars spent. This direct measurement of results makes search marketing both complex and tantalizing.

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