Sem for the uninitiated is a set of marketing techniques used to increase
the visibility of a website in a search engine's results. Sem involves biding
for the right word at a cost on search engines like yahoo!, Google and MSN. Search
results get better with more keywords. The long tail theory states that the greater
the number of words that a company bids on the lower is the cost of acquiring
results. Some advertisers bid on 50 words or less but there are those particularly
globally who bid on a million search terms. The client is charged either on a
cost per click (CPC) basis or and visits generated through a search engine or
on a cost per acquisition basis (CPA). Here the results paid for are either leads
of enquiries or sales. Pinstorm
founder and CEO Mahesh Murthy says, "22 of the top 50 and 37 of the top 100
search advertisers by keyword volume are from within Indian operations. India
produces over a billion online searches each month and the number is growing as
people research choices, product details and prices for every sot of buying decision.
These range from travel to insurance, education and even a film career." The
top Sem buyers in the past year. The top five spenders are all Internet companies. Naukri,
together with 99acres and Jeevan Saathi Rs 97 million; Ebay Rs 92 million; Monster
together with JobsAhead Rs 64 million; Google Rs 58 million; Yahoo Rs 32 million;
Citibank Rs 27 million; HP Rs 25 million; World Space Rs 20 million. In
terms of sectors spending on search advertising this is what the break up looks
like:
Retail, ecommerce Rs 189,679,644
Technology Rs 116,153,190
Travel
Rs 173,650,230
Automotive Rs 10,321,020
Banking, Financial Services Rs 145,039,410
Dating,
Matrimonial Rs 31,681,530
Education Rs 24,571,674
General Online Rs 227,842,308
Jobs
Rs 175,270,878
Media Rs 41,113,170
Made for Ad Sense Rs 155,725,416
NGO
Rs 11,697,696
Property Rs 25,517,916 The
study notes that you can never have too many keywords. Search engines including
Google recently announced that almost half of their search enquiries have never
been asked before. One needs to keep adding to the keyword list and also think
of things that have not occurred to the competition. Travel sites routinely buy
and deploy over three million keywords each on search marketing campaigns. Longer
phrases convert better. The
study notes that buying sponsored links on a page can be effective. Many users
do not distinguish between the natural organic results on the left hand side of
a page and the sponsored links on the right hand side. Pinstorm studies show that
between five to 40 per cent of users click on sponsored links instead of organic
results. Hence
finding new search terms is important. This is what Pinstorm calls Undiscovered
Gems. One way is to pay for misspelt words. Often people type in a hurry and the
word is spelt wrongly though the intent is the same. Savings of as much as 90
per cent are possible using this route. Pinstrom has developed customised tools
to generate these search terms and each have in house keyword databases in excess
of 10 million keywords. Advertisers
and search specialist firms realise that the long tail is important in their search
efforts and routinely manage portfolios in excess of 100,000 keywords for each
client. Global marketers who operate in multiple languages and across countries
have a presence of several million keywords. Some search specialist firms have
moved to a pay for performance model. | 
