Search Marketing - Darin Carter

The internet as we know it is constantly changing and facilitating to the needs of people all over the globe. Every day there are new applications and pieces of software being produced like people spewing out of a revolving door. With every new innovation on the web comes an enormous influx of visitors. The flooding of online searches has caught the eye of many entrepreneurs looking to make a buck. There are two main players when it comes to making money off of all of this traffic. One is the advertiser and the other is the publisher. The online advertiser has several ways to promote his or her product. It is widely known that pay per click advertising or PPC is the leading form of online advertising. Advertisers usually run campaigns where they get charged a specific amount of money every time their ad is clicked. The other player is the publisher or search engine marketer. Essentially, the publisher or search engine marketer is the person that displays the advertiser’s ad to targeted audiences on the web. Now, it is important to understand that both of these topics are so intricate that they could be discussed for days. However, this article will explain the overall ideas and concepts associated with both.

The ultimate goal for advertising campaigns is to make money. Any good marketer knows that there is no better way to make money than to advertise in front of a specific, targeted audience of visitors. This is exactly where the internet shines. For example, a billboard is another form of advertisement where an ad is placed in front of thousands of people driving about in their cars each day. A billboard is going to display an ad in front of a large, un-targeted audience. Let’s examine what happens when a fast food ad on a billboard is viewed by three people. One is an average person that eats fast food regularly. The other is a diabetic who is on a strict, healthy diet. The other is a vegetarian who never eats fast food. Do you see what’s going on here? The result of un-targeted advertising is low conversion rates. With the internet, a baseball bat company can advertise on specific, baseball bat niche site where every visitor is interested in baseball bat. Do you see the difference? Having targeted visitors greatly increases the rate at which visitors become buyers, and advertisers make money. Now, it is time to introduce the topic of contextual advertising. Contextual advertisements are excellent for a single reason, they can captivate the reader’s attention and thus increase the click though rate. The click through rate is the percentage of visitors that visited a specific site and clicked an advertisement. So basically PPC campaigns are a great way to not only increase the public’s awareness of a particular product, but also increase sales. In fact, there are a growing number of people out there that make their entire living off of taking a product, creating a pay per click campaign, and reaping the profits. The idea behind this lucrative strategy is simple. If an advertiser gets charged ten cents every time their ad is clicked and makes a fifty dollar sale for every twenty five visitors, then a forty seven dollar profit was just made. With the right product, one could potentially make some serious money. With any pay per click campaign there are two important aspects to understand. The first is choosing the right topic. Hot topics and necessities are always a good choice. The next topic is the conversion rate. Every product will have a different conversion rate. It is important to know this statistic like the back of your hand if you plan on making any money, especially when you are spending money to make it.

Now that we have talked about the advertising end of the spectrum, let’s talk about the search engine marketer’s end. Search engine marketers are most notably known as webmasters, or people who own websites. These people are the ones that have the ability to harness the mass amounts of traffic that flood the web each and every day. The source of all of this targeted, organic traffic is through search engines. They have the option to choose which method to monetize their traffic. One of the most well known forms of monetization is contextual advertising. Many contextual pay per click advertising networks are
great for making money because they have the ability to recognize the main point of a particular page’s content and then serve related ads based upon that content. If you remember from earlier on in the discussion, then you know that targeted advertising is key for making money on both sides of the spectrum. So, webmasters decide on which advertising network to use and create ads for their websites. After all customizations are finished, the ad is inserted into the website’s template and the ads are served to visitors. The publisher then earns a certain percentage of each click. The percentages earned for each click are weighed upon a variety of different factors. Some topics or keywords pay more per click than others. Essentially, the network splits the amount of money earned with the publisher because, quite frankly, the publisher is helping them make more money. Every advertising network is
going to have different rates or percentages shared with the publisher. The anomalous part about it is that not all networks choose to list this “shared” percentage. So publishers never really know what percentage of each click that they are getting. Anyways, publishing targeted ads on a website is a highly effective method of harnessing the power of traffic into a steady stream of income. There have been many principles covered in this article that I hope you found useful. Remember that the basic essentials of successful advertising are volume and targeted visitors.