New Moves in Search Engine Advertising - Use Your Imagination
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The company created a software program and a set of services designed to unveil the less obvious – and therefore less expensive – keyword choices that clients can use to get their ad in front of their target audience. As a result, they spend less money than their competitors, but reach nearly the same people. To make this work, it helps to engage your imagination a bit more about exactly what terms your target customer might put into the search engine.
Let’s suppose for a moment that you have an inexpensive hotel in New York, and you want to get your ad in front of out-of-state tourists. You could bid on the obvious, “cheap hotel New York,” but you’ll find that bidding on that keyword phrase runs several dollars. What else would an out-of-state tourist search for? Perhaps terms such as “NY subway map” or “Statue of Liberty” might go into the search engine as well. They may not be as directly related to booking a hotel as the other terms – but they also cost mere pennies.
This is only a small scale example. Pinstorm CEO Mahesh Murthy can cite much more extreme examples. Staying in the hotel field, for example, he has seen keywords that sell for $45 per click. “If you convert five percent of the visitors, the cost per sale is $900. It makes no sense to spend $900 to sell a $300 hotel room. There are huge inefficiencies in the bidding process,” he pointed out in an interview with Reuters.
It is worth looking at typical search engine advertiser behavior to better understand the dynamic, and what Murthy’s company offers. Many advertisers focus their efforts on 50 to 500 keywords. They tend to think of the same, fairly obvious ones for their field – so, according to the laws of supply and demand, those terms get bid up in auctions.
Murthy takes advantage of that relatively limited vocabulary by sidestepping it, thus potentially delivering more bang for the buck. Thanks in part to the company’s BroadSword software, it boasts about seven million “cheap” search terms. Rather than being limited to 50 or 500, Pinstorm can position clients with 10,000 to one million search terms.
Geographical region and search engine also has an effect on the cost of advertising. In some parts of Asia, it is more expensive to advertise on Yahoo! than Google. In China, particularly, domestic search engines have more of an audience than Google, which affects advertising as you would expect it to. For those willing to consider search engines other than Google, it is worth noting that “You will find sets of words highly bid up on Google that are virtually free on Overture,” according to Murthy.
Next: Yahoo! Targets Behavior >>
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