Get online or be dead! Part II

I need to hand it to Google though. They have really revolutionised the world of search on the Internet. Their online glossaries and even the conversion software, Analytics have helped any layman become an expert in this very complicted field. I fell into all this thanks to a little bit of curiosity and lot of luck. Like many other companies, our company too had outsourced online marketing including the SEM (Search Engine Marketing) for years now.
But about two years ago, we realised that we needed to get it all inhouse. Fortunately, with all the softwares and tools that Google offers, it was possible to do so a lot faster. I was not an expert in computers but was always good in marketing and pretty comfortable around new softwares. And thats how I started. Having gone through all the google blogs and texts, I saw that we were not completely exploiting the potential of the Internet. Of course we had expert companies doing our online marketing but they were not from our field. What was but natural for us, wasn't so evident to them. So with all this homework done, I was ready to try it out for myself. I used the Google Analytics code to track our Hotel website and thus build a picture of our online customers. It gave me a lot of precious information, like what pages they visited most, what words did they type in to search for whatever they were looking for, etc. It also helped us to calculate a very accurate ROI (return on investment), which is not the case with the traditional (offline) means of marketing, like newspaper ads and billboards. Once into it, I couldn't really get off it and consecuently I could see the results in terms of revenue increase. The sale of rooms actually tripled in 1 year. What is nice about the whole thing though, is the fact that anyone can use this in their field of expertise. All you need is some patience to go through the easy 'step by step' manuals.

Here are few terms that we all marketers need to know now:

CPA: Cost per action. The effectiveness of many other forms of online advertising have their effectiveness measured on a cost per action basis. Many affiliate marketing programs and contextual ads are structured on a cost per action basis. An action may be anything from an ad click, to filling out a lead form, to buying a product.

CPC: Cost per click. Many search ads and contextually targeted ads are sold in auctions where the advertiser is charged a certain price per click.

CPM: Cost per thousand ad impressions. Many people use CPM as a measure of how profitable a website is or has the potential of becoming.

CTR: Clickthrough rate - the percentage of people who view click on an advertisement they viewed, which is a way to measure how relevant a traffic source or keyword is. Search ads typically have a higher clickthrough rate than traditional banner ads due to being highly relevant to implied searcher demand.

PPC: Pay Per Click is a pricing model which most search ads and many contextual ad programs are sold through. PPC ads only charge advertisers if a potential customer clicks on an ad.

ROI: Return on Investment is a measure of how much return you receive from each marketing dollar. While ROI is a somewhat sophisticated measurement, some search marketers prefer to account for their marketing using more sophisticate profit elasticity calculations.

SEM :Search engine marketing

SEO: Search engine optimization is the art and science of publishing information and marketing it in a manner that helps search engines understand your information is relevant to relevant search queries. SEO consists largely of keyword research, SEO copywriting, information architecture, link building, brand building, building mindshare, reputation management, and viral marketing.

SERP : Search Engine Results Page is the page on which the search engines show the results for a search query.

Spider : Search engine crawlers which search or "spider" the web for pages to include in the index. Many non-traditional search companies have different spiders which perform other applications. For example, TurnItInBot searches for plagiarism. Spiders should obey the robots.txt protocol.

TrustRank : Search relevancy algorithm which places additional weighting on links from trusted seed websites that are controlled by major corporations, educational institutions, or governmental institutions. (Source: seobook.com)

Finally, I would like to conclude that the marketing plans that are being concieved, have to be a balance of online and offline marketing, as the customers havea tendency of switching medias and that makes it a lot challenging to track and the calculate the ROI. For example: a customer might find you online by typing in the keywords and then finally not buy anything on your site, but might later call you over the phone.

The bottomline is if you dont figure in the first 2 pages of Google and the Yahoo, MSN (Live), you are as good as dead.... All the best.