Indian Eye

The Internet has transformed from a mere information resource, to an active ground for businesses looking for leads or sales. The inherent dynamism of the media, coupled with measurability is making it a favorite with advertisers. It is no surprise that more and more advertisers are visible online. For an advertiser, there is a bouquet of options, that include portals, search engines or even third party inventory aggregators.

But when it comes to cost or performance, search engine based advertising is the clear winner hands-down. This has historically been the case, and I can vouch from my experience managing a multitude of campaigns over the years. If an average banner ad campaign fetches you leads at Rs. X, a well managed search engine  sponsored ad can get you the same for 1/3rd the cost. And the same is for performance. The lead-sale conversion from a sponsored search ad-campaign is almost twice that of a regular campaign. And amongst search engines, Google has the edge in terms of the volumes (almost 90% of the leads) but Yahoo is at par or better than Google when it comes to conversions.

For conventional banner based advertising or variants, the only way to catch up is by introducing a dynamic, preemptive and context-intelligent ad delivery model. As for media aggregators or media-buyers, its in the interest of their consumers that they make course corrections in their campaign based on real-time monitoring, and campaign intelligence.

The demand for better performing ad-units is intense, and so is the competition amongst them. And competition is always a good thing to have.