What is SEM or Search Engine Marketing?
Friday, June 26th, 2009The internet age as you’re already aware has truly arrived in Las Vegas. With millions of new users going onto the internet every year, the web has become a powerful media outlet and promotions tool for your Las Vegas business. Businesses are using online advertising in a big way and this is evidenced by the steep increase in internet marketing advertising dollars spent since the year 2002.
The rapid increase in the number of websites online has prompted the creation of search engines to help people find information easily. These search engines have started started programs like pay per click and paid advertisements on for their search results.
Search engine marketing (SEM) is a form of internet advertising used to market websites that successfully taps the never ending demand for seeking information and your company’s products and services. The various SEM methods include search engine optimization (SEO), paid placement and paid inclusion programs like google AdWords. With more than three quarters of advertisers vouching for it, SEO is still the most common form of SEM.
To advertise online, it takes a strategy, but not the hiring of a marketing agency in particular - you just have to have the know how and the interest in starting your own online SEM marketing campaign. The text ads that are a sponsored in google listing let’s say, are visible when users perform a search epitomize search marketing campaigns. Marketers buy the rights for relevant ads and pre-chose keywords and key phrases to be placed when the users type in certain search terms.
Marketers were initially hesitant to invest in search engine marketing. However, that feeling has changed over the past couple of years in the business world and a majority of senior executives consider SEM a critical component in their marketing strategy. The spending on SEM programs is predicted to increase in the future years driven by rising keyword prices, advertising space demand, and the fact that small businesses are running online marketing campaigns using keywords.
OgilvyOne Worldwide, a part of Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide is coming to this field in a big way by starting a new unit dedicated to search marketing, NeoSearch@Ogilvy. Marketing teams of all businesses have a tough job on setting their budget especially when it comes to proving a return on investment. The success of search engine marketing is attributed to the fact that advertisers pay ONLY when a user clicks on an ad.
SEM is also a controversial medium, as a series of studies and reports conducted by Consumers Reports WebWatch has targeted it. The pay per click model, though efficient, is vulnerable to click through fraud. Fake clicks from anonymous sources (or competitors) that have no intention of purchasing but done so for dubious reasons increase the ad spending of business without generating sufficient revenue from sales. The big players in the SEM field, Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing and Microsoft adCenter are taking major efforts to incorporate more transparency in the search engines and to prevent such fraudulent activities in this fast growing advertising medium which is predicted to overtake traditional means of advertising like television.