What is Search Engine Marketing / SEM ?
When search engine companies (Google, MSN, Bing and Yahoo) achieved large scale global user adoption, they sought ways to monetise or generate a revenue stream from the free services they provided. One form of successful revenue streams for the search engine company’s resulted from the introduction of sponsored listings in search results.
How does it work?
SEM is based on ‘pay-per-click’ advertising and is best described when a user enters a search string in a search engine for a product or service and the search keywords used would also display relevant sponsored listings at the top of the results page.
Search Engine Marketing Process:
The business responsible for the creation of a displayed sponsored result is charged a nominal pre-determined fee set by the search engine company (Pay-Per-Click fee) if a user clicks on that sponsored result. For a company to obtain a sponsored result for a given search or keyword entered by a user, an advertising campaign is created with the search engine company and specific keywords are chosen relevant to the company’s products/services. This process is also known as Pay-Per-Click advertising.
Creating a successful SEM campaign:
At Tara Concepts, we can assist you with the creation of a SEM campaign specifically tailored for your product/service target market. Decisions regarding the scale of following points can contribute significantly to the cost associated with forming a SEM campaign:
- Geographical Target Market (Local/National/Global)
- The number of Products or Services to be included.
- The number of keywords chosen to match with an individual Product / Service.
- Choosing to run the SEM campaign on one or many of the most popular Search Engines.
A common approach for the majority of companies involved in SEM campaigns is to set a fixed monthly budget and then tailor different metrics of the SEM campaign to fit within the budget constraints.