Search Engine Marketing
The internet has revolutionized the way companies can cost-effectively target and attract customers. By advertising with search engines, companies can ensure that prospects visiting their website are very interested in their products. Furthermore, not only can they segment and target their advertising more effectively by dimensions including geography and time of day to improve efficiency, but also they don’t have to pay any advertising fees unless a visitor actually clicks the advertisement to go to the company website. Thus, compared to traditional media, you can take a significant amount of guesswork out of advertising. For every ad placed and dollar spent, you will know exactly how effective it is and you can directly correlate your marketing expense with your revenue attainment.
In advertising with search engines like Google, Yahoo!, MSN, advertisers bid on keywords using an auction system. That means that you bid for your ads to show up when users query on certain keywords, and your ads are displayed primarily in the order of the bids placed, highest bid to lowest bid. These ads are most often displayed on the top and the right side of the page and are labeled “sponsored links”. This type of advertising is commonly referred to as “paid search” or pay-per-click” (PPC).
Unfortunately, managing this manual process is both labor-intensive and inefficient. Managing a library of hundreds and thousands of keywords and ads, each with different bids, different parameters, different effectiveness, different competitors and across different search engines can be overwhelming. Analyzing and calculating which keywords, ads, bids, geographies and times of day are most effective needs to be continuously monitored, measured and optimized. It is no surprise that this can be a full-time job for someone with substantial training and deep domain expertise.
However, Yield makes all this easy. Yield automates and optimizes your search engine marketing to ensure the best results with a minimal amount of effort. First, Yield recommends keywords to bid on based on the content of the web page, historical keyword traffic, keyword popularity and keyword competition. Next, it determines keyword bid amounts, allocates your budget and purchases keywords from search engines. It evaluates the most effective keywords, ads and bids. Then, based on marketing objectives which could include maximizing page views, conversions (e.g. newsletter signups, whitepaper downloads, etc.) and monetary values assigned to conversions, it optimizes and reallocates the budgets and adjust bids accordingly.
Yield Software is a fully-integrated suite of automated web marketing capabilities. You can also learn more about search engine optimization and landing page optimization.