Here is yet another way to demonstrate the power of the internet as an effective advertising portal. Traditional advertising portals such as TV, Radio and Print Newspapers are facing declines in the amount of ad revenues for their mediums while online advertising has been seeing increases year after year.  The trend is here to stay as internet advertising is ideally positioned to surpass radio ads by year’s end.  

In an article published on internetnews.com, it was noted that “Internet display advertising expenditures from January to June this year grew to $5.6 billion, up 17.7 percent from the same period a year ago, according to a report from TNS Media Intelligence.  In the same article it was said that “Television ads decreased 2.4 percent to $31.6 billion. Newspapers dropped 5.8 percent to $12.9 billion. And radio decreased 2.7 percent to $5.1 billion, a drop that matches an e-Marketer report earlier this month that, for the first time, online advertising will surpass radio advertising spending in the US.

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Contextual Advertising is a program in which advertisers’ paid listing appears on web sites containing content relevant to the listings. It’s another method of distributing paid listings by search engines as opposed to the traditional means of inserting them into search results. In traditional search, advertisers choose relevant keywords and then bid on them.

Searchers enter queries, and if the advertiser has chosen that keyword, then the ad is shown. This creates a one to one matching which is straightforward to monitor and optimize. This process is different for the contextual advertising. Here, the engine analyzes advertiser’s entire keyword list and ad text in an ad group, assigns a theme to that ad group and then matches this theme to sites in its network.

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Wouldn’t it be great if every click or impression resulted in a sale? One of my goals as a search engine marketing strategist is to help my clients achieve as many sales as possible. The first step to ensuring that happens is to drive traffic to their website via the search engines. However, one of the biggest challenges is ensuring that the traffic results in qualified leads.

It should come as no surprise that the search engine marketing industry is becoming more and more competitive every day. With more competitors coming into the picture and with Google changing their CPC bidding structure, how can the small to midsize businesses compete with the corporate players?

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