Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
Search Engine Marketing (SEM) etc
Internet has huge collection of websites, blogs, post, etc. As per general survey, the total number of websites in the world exceeds 1.5 billion in 2019! And, there are 31 million bloggers having more than 600 million blogs online!
Out of this many website, the required information is in which of the websites / blogs would be not known completely to any of the user. Also, which of the them are more relevant, would also not be known.
Thus, there requires some search mechanism which can perform searches of the required information all over these websites / blogs distributed in the world and return the most relevant results in the form of websites, blogs, etc. This search mechanism requirement over the internet is taken care by so called search engine.
Examples of search engine are as follows:
Google (www.google.com) – 5.6 billion searches per day
Bing (www.bing.com) – 122.8 million searches per day
Baidu (www.baidu.com) – 3.3 billion searches per day
These massive figures highlight the importance of search engine and its usage being done by internet users to search various contents, information, blogs, website, etc. over the internet. This in turn reveals the crucial role played by the search engine in increasing the traffic to the websites which are in the higher position of the search results.
Having understood the meaning of Search Engine, let us try to understand the simple meaning of Marketing. In simple terms, marketing means advertisement of Products / Services with the primary intension of having sales of products / services to gain Business.
Thus, Search engine marketing means advertisement of products / services on search engine to massive online users of it to gain business out of it.
What are the examples of various search engine portal for doing advertising on it ?
Google AdWords-(https://ads.google.com)
Bing Ads-(ads.microsoft.com)
Yahoo Search Ads-
How do search engine charges advertiser for doing advertising on it ? How much is the charge of doing advertising on any popular search engines?
Let us try to understand by taking an example of popular search engine Google.
Google uses Ad Auction method for determining the charges per click done on the advertise by its users for displaying ads from various advertiser on its search engine. When users will enter text in to the search box to be search for, Google will determine whether that Text contains keywords that advertisers are currently bidding. If advertisers have bided on some of the keywords in the Text, then the Ad auction begins.
The purpose of the Ad auction is to determine Ad Rank to know as to where each ad will be positioned in search engine results page. Advertisers will bid on the specific keywords. To have proper positioning of ads from various advertisers, Google gives Rank to each advertiser ads based on CPC Bid and Quality score as explained below:
AD Rank = CPC Bid x Quality Score. Quality score is metric used by google to determine how relevant and useful the ad is to the user. Higher the relevancy of the content and usefulness to the user, higher will be the Quality score of that ads.
Below is the example of calculation of Ad Ranks based on Bid Amount and Quality score of advertisers:
Advertiser Position
Advertiser Position
|
Maximum Bid Amount
|
Quality Score
|
Ad Rank
|
Advertiser 1
|
$2
|
10
|
20
|
Advertiser 2
|
$3
|
5
|
15
|
Advertiser 3
|
$4
|
3
|
12
|
Advertiser 4
|
$5
|
2
|
10
|
Advertiser 5
|
$6
|
1
|
6
|
Thus, based on the two factors, advertisers are given rank of displaying their ads.
Does it mean that advertisers will require to pay Max Bid per click?
No. Advertisers have to pay based on the Cost per Click (CPC) calculation done by the following formula:
Cost Per Click (CPC) = Ad Rank of the Advertiser below / Quality score + $ 0.01
Let us try to understand how much will advertiser 1,2 and 3 requires to pay.
Advertiser 1 CPC = 15/10 + $0.01 = $1.51
Advertiser 2 CPC = 12/5 + $0.01 = $2.41
Advertiser 3 CPC = 10/3 + $0.01 = $3.34
Thus, based on number of click done by users of search engine displaying the advertisers ads, Advertiser will be charged by the Google. For example, Advertiser 1 will be charged maximum $151 for 100 clicks ($1.51 x 100 =$151).
What does keyword mean in the context of search engine? How much is average cost per click for popular keywords?
Search engine is basically the computer algorithm. And so, when users put any Text in the search box of search engine website, various important words from the text entered will be searched by search engine in various websites to determine websites containing the matching words. After finding the most relevant websites based on its data analysis algorithm, it will display them in the form of search results. Let us try to understand by an illustration.
Assume that user has enter the Text “What is currency?” in the search engine. This text is containing ‘What’, ‘is’ and ‘currency’ as the words. Out of this important word is ‘Currency’ which is called keyword in context of search engine. Search engine will search this keyword in various websites throughout the world, determine the websites having this keyword and thereby based on its relevancy display various websites in the form of search results. Thus, keyword play an important role in search engine. Higher the search for a keyword, higher will be the number of users and so higher will be the advertisement cost for that keyword.
To understand that, below is the table having popular keywords by industry and their average cost per click in 2019 in google:
Keyword Average CPC
Insurance. $59
Gas / Electricity $57
Loans $50
Mortgage $44
Attorney $48
Lawyer $43
Donate $42
Conference Call $42
Degree $40
Credit $38
Thus, we have understood the meaning of search engine, realize the importance of search engine because of massive users of it who are performing various search operations and had thereby understood the marketing cost on search engines by various examples.
