An Introduction to Search Engine Marketing

Search engine marketing, or SEM, is one of the most effective ways to grow your business in an increasingly competitive marketplace. It’s never been more important to advertise online, and search engine marketing is the most effective way to promote your products and grow your business.

The difference between a SEO & SEM is that the former is organic and free, whereas the latter is paid.

SEM- An Overview:

When you search for something, we see some links with ‘Ad’ written nearby. These are the paid search results, whereas the links below are organic content.
Advertisers bid on keywords that users of services such as Google and Bing might enter when looking for certain products or services, which gives the advertiser the opportunity for their ads to appear alongside results for those search queries.

They are also called as Pay-per-click ads (PPC). They are in a variety of formats.
  • AdWords Ad - These are the text ads along with a link to the landing page. The target is the keyword itself.
  • Product Listing or Shopping Ads - These are ads which features the image of a product/service along with a link to the landing shopping site. The target is the 'Product' or 'category' to which it belongs.



How it is done?


1. The first thing that one must do is to identify the keywords that is most likely to be searched with respect to the product/service offered. Google’s keyword planner would help in this aspect with the analytics regarding the volume, target geography etc.

 2. Thorough keyword research can also help you identify negative keywords – search terms that you should exclude from your campaigns. Negative keywords aren’t terms with negative connotations, but rather irrelevant terms that are highly unlikely to result in conversions. For example, if you sell ice cream, you might want to exclude the keyword “ice cream recipes”, as users searching for ice cream recipes are unlikely to be in the market for your product.

3. There’s an auction that happens where one bids for the keyword. Let’s see how this works.

Not every single ad will appear on every single search. This is because the ad auction takes a variety of factors into account when determining the placement of ads on the Search Engine Result Pages, and because not every keyword has sufficient commercial intent to justify displaying ads next to results. However, the two main factors that Google evaluates as part of the ad auction process are your maximum bid and the Quality Score of your ads.

Maximum bid is the maximum amount you have specified you are willing to pay for a click. Quality Score is a metric based on the overall quality of your advertisement. Google calculates these metrics during the ad auction to determine placement of advertisements. The result of this calculation is known as ad rank.


Given that Google AdWords’ Quality Score comprises half of the ad rank formula, it is one of the most crucial metrics search engine marketers can focus on. High Quality Scores can help you achieve better ad position at lower costs, because Google favors ads that are highly relevant to user queries. Quality Score is arguably the most important metric in search engine marketing

 These are the basics that a marketer needs to know about SEM. Keep watching out this space to know more about digital marketing!
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References:
1. http://www.cpcstrategy.com.
2. http://www.wordstream.com.

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