Google’s revenues rose by 3 percent in the quarter ending June 30, 2009 when the rest of the advertising industry was going through its worst slump in a decade. Of the £13bn that google made last year, 97 percent came from advertising, either google adwords or google adsense. It’s clear that google is an advertising company revenue-wise more than a technology firm.
Google has essentially created a new advertising market for small and medium sized businesses. Businesses who never considered advertising before, or at best, advertised in the local directory. The key to this change has been the technological advances which enables advertisers to target customers very specifically. When the scatter-gun of traditional media advertising like print and TV is wasted on so much of the audience, search advertising has the advantage of being at the right place at the right time aimed at the right people.
This results in a wide range of advertising opportunities and competition becomes ( comparatively ) less which in turn lowers the cost of advertising to its potential clientèle. This advantage is magnified when we are able to precisely measure the result of advertising and see the increase in business due to a campaign.
The tools for business for advertising have been pay per click ( ppc ) like google adwords , advertising next to relevant content like the yahoo publisher network or the latest location based advertising in Google mobile. Google adwords depends on Google being the dominant search engine where potential customers searching for a specific query are presented with normal results as well as sponsored results relevant to the search. The sponsored results are as relevant as possible to the users taking into account their demographic and geographic profiles. Content based advertising relies on the quality of the content to match relevant advertising to the websites, so it’s seen only by the most interested parties. Location based advertising puts the power of the mobile network into the hands of the advertiser by knowing precisely where the customer is at the moment when they search Google.
For too long advertisers have been throwing money at traditional media hoping some thing will generate results. But now there is a viable, measurable and less expensive medium that works. Even when the recession is over, we will see Internet marketing be the main stay for small business.
