Facts, Fiction and views by valuepitchers

SEM - selling stuff online using search engines...how tricky could that possibly be??

Well..especially when you have these search engines where millions of people keep searching and searching...and searching!!

Right from "mallika sherawat" to "where are my house keys" to "free home-made dog food recepeis" to "1 billion e-mail addresses".........anything and everything basically! And more often than not, they do find what they are looking for!

An engine like Google scans through millions of pages in seconds and provides results most relevant to the user's search. So, it's pretty simple...you bid for keywords that a user might search for when looking up for something you think u can provide him with..the keywords would trigger your ad to show up in one corner of the search page as "sponsored links".. just hope he sees it..finds it appealing enough to click on it..goes to your web page and takes the desired action..and you end up making money out of it! Simple, ain't it??

Well, atleast the entire concept of SEM as it is, sounds not too difficult to comprehend. But to implement it most effectively requires deep (i mean really DEEP) knowledge of how things actually work!

That's where the real game begins!!

The rules are straightforward...each keyword is assigned a "quality score" depending on how relevant it is to your product, its history and many other factors. This, along with the amount you bid for that keyword, in turn determines the price you actually pay for that keyword to trigger ads.

Now, you obviously would want to stay ahead of the competition and would want your ads to show at higher positions than your competitors (which increases the likelihood of someone seeing it and then maybe clicking on it), so you either bid more or work out a way to improve your quality score. And since you would want to limit the amount that you spend, you could really benefit from improving your quality score!

QUALITY SCORE - this is where I believe that the GREY area lies!!

It is assigned by the Google as "Great", "Ok" or "Poor" depending on numerous factors of which only a small percentage is known to you! So there's only so much that you can do to improve it!

There was a time when one was kept totally oblivious to the keyword's quality by the Google. So u never knew what quality your keywords had..all you could do was to make random changes and see if that worked! So, just the fact that we now get to see how our keywords are rated (as great, ok, poor) is a blessing!

Now, clearly quality score is one of the MOST important parameters to anyone who is into SEM since it determines to a large extent the price that you pay...and yet not everything is known about it! Why won't the Google give out your quality scores in the range of 1-100 (say) and reveal all the factors they take into account to determine quality??

Google would probably argue that the quality score must be complicated and must be hidden, because the problem of determining ad relevance is a fundamentally hard problem, and because openness would enable the Bad Guys to game the system.

Huh??So is it like..you don't know about it and hence can't do much about it? Isn't it "security through obscurity"??

Anyway, it is as it is and we really can't do much besides raking our brains to know as much as we can about the QUALITY SCORE ..something which has always intrigued every one working with it!

There are people all around who are working at it...putting in their best efforts to crack the hidden secrets-

reading up information, experimenting with their accounts, sharing knowledge and still learning and improving all the time!

That's all that one can do after all!

And the QS is only one parameter...there are a numerous other things that still need some detailed study to be understood and executed to perfection!

There's a lot of knowledge to be gained from the EXPERTS with vast experiences in the field, but they too differ in their opinions!

That's something very typical of SEM...there's no standard solution to a problem..because each problem is quite unique in itself! There are guidelines...but they are strictly to GUIDE you! It's for you figure out what works best for you!

The best way is "trial and error", they say!

Everyone is still in the process of doing just that - trying out different things, learning with each experience and figuring out best ways to optimize results!

This is something I derive my KICKS from! There's always scope for experimentation, room to explore, knowing the 'unknown'; or rather the 'lesser known'!

Which is why I believe..."SEM-It's deeper than you think it is"!!

How deep??

You've got to just keep digging!!