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Why Search Marketing Is Effective For Automotive Business

By admin
23
Mar 2010

In the present economic situation, automotive businesses cannot afford to invest in marketing strategies that offer sluggish growth. Automotive businesses need a marketing strategy that can generate conversions and sales within inexpensive budgets. Search marketing has characteristics of such an effective marketing solution with an immense potential to generate considerable conversions for an automotive business.

Inexpensive marketing budgets
According to Autodata estimates, the overall auto sales in US fell by 34 percent in May 2009 compared to the previous year. Many major automakers reported a significant drop in their auto sales. During these hard times, it is not feasible for automotive retailers to run after branding with huge marketing investments.Search marketing is a cost-effective and proven solution for automotive retailers, which enables them to maintain a profitable Internet presence that generate leads. As it helps them to reach targeted traffic with inexpensive budgets, chances for improving ROI are likely to increase significantly.

Measure the performance
Another major feature, which makes search marketing effective, is its measurable performance. As the search marketing results are measurable, automotive businesses that invest in it can evaluate the efficiency of their marketing campaign. They can compare these results with other marketing campaigns and make adjustments in their budgets accordingly. Hence, this enables them to optimize their results consistently. It also helps them to avoid the risk of investing in a non-performing marketing strategy.

Using the potential of online search
Online search became a day-to-day activity in the US across all age groups. According to Pew Internet and American Life report in 2008, almost half of the overall US Internet users (413.2 Million, according to Internetworldstats.com) are searching online on a daily basis. According to comScore, Americans conducted a remarkable 14.8 billion core searches in April 2009 compared to 10.6 billion in April 2008.

Nowadays, customers prefer to explore details before purchasing any product/service. A survey from iProspect, Jupiter Research, and the NPD group in 2008 says that around 92% of people who search online click on a search result within the first three pages. This shows the importance of first page search listings for automotive businesses to leverage the potential of online search for generating conversions.

It is very crucial for automotive businesses, to persistently maximize their ROI in order to survive in the present day market. Search marketing can provide impressive results for these businesses within their marketing budgets. Search marketing is measurable and enables automotive retailers to consistently measure and compare the results of their marketing campaigns. The above mentioned points explain whysearch marketing is an effective marketing solution for automotive business.

Category: Advertising  Tags: , , , , , , , , ,  2 Comments

Dramatic Fall In Education Standards In Just One Decade

By admin
23
Mar 2010

The Indian Higher Education System has a history of imparting quality education. This was a major strength and competitive advantage of India. During the years when offshoring was not yet popular, the PowerPoint presentations created for top management of North American / European companies would include several slides on the quality of education in India and the difficulty of getting admission into higher education. However, this major strength and competitive advantage has rapidly eroded in the past decade.

Currently, even mediocre talent can easily get into professional colleges
Earlier, many talented people could not join professional courses, now even mediocre talent can easily get admission in AP. The number of engineering seats in Andhra Pradesh increased from about 4000 in 1989 to about 1.5 lakh by 2009. Even the number of MBA seats grew to about 20,000 from 2000 in just 10 years. However, the number of regular graduate students has remained about the same. This rapid growth in number of seats created a dearth of competition among students. It declined the caliber of students joining these courses.

This situation has been worsened by the greed of both students and their parents. When a professional course is paying good salaries to fresh graduates, many have succumbed by opting for such courses despite their interests/ capabilities not matching with what is required to be successful in that field.  Earlier many of such students would not have got admission into professional colleges.  However, today because of the manifold increase in the educational institutions offering such courses they can easily get admission in professional courses. This awareness that they will anyway get into a professional college further removes incentives for students to compete and strive hard to get into a professional course.

Lack of quality teaching staff
In the late 90’s, while the number of educational institutions was increasing manifold, many of the competent junior faculty left for lucrative careers in corporate sector. Over the years, the senior faculty have retired, while the remaining junior faculty got promoted as principals / Head of Departments of the new colleges. The existing educational system at that time had a limit on the number of quality teaching faculty they could generate. This combination of factors, manifold increase in colleges, retiring of senior faculty, good mid-level faculty leaving education system for lucrative corporate careers and limit of the number of good new teaching faculty that could be generated, dramatically led to the lack of quality teaching staff in professional colleges, as we see today.  This lack of quality teaching staff seriously impairs a systematic and disciplined imparting of education. Thus, it has caused a dramatic fall in educational standards across the entire state.

Social welfare measures providing free education destroyed the value of education
As a social development initiative, the government has with good intentions provided free education to students from some backgrounds who joined professional courses. However, human nature typically tends to value that are expensive and difficult to get. When education was made free, this move possibly led to undervalue the education.  The commitment level to pursue education was lowered due to the low out-of-pocket expenses. There was little to lose by neglecting their studies. However, this remains only a secondary issue.

Shift in importance to style rather than substance
Since it is not possible to deliver on teaching / educational standards, the new colleges have conveniently shifted focus to style and drama.  Fancy things like great looking college buildings, appearance of college buses, student dress codes, college events, and size of the campuses were given more priority than the quality of education. Such fancy things have caused further damage to quality education since the students in their formative years have been exposed to fancy ideas. These fancy ideas have become deeply ingrained due to the mass hysteria created by so many colleges preaching the same message.

This document was drafted many months before the Yashpal Committee report was made public. Even this report says, “Mushrooming engineering and management colleges, with some notable exceptions, have largely become, mere business entities dispensing very poor quality education.”

The end result today is large number of students who have neither the knowledge, the stamina to do quality work, the skills or caliber that is required of employees today to be able to deliver in the competitive, dynamic and global market environment today. This was before the recession hit the world and made things even more difficult for businesses to be viable.

Category: Advertising  Tags: , , , , , , , , ,  5 Comments

Major Trends in Click Fraud

By admin
23
Mar 2010

Click fraud has become a menace in the Internet Marketing Industry. Click fraud is such a simple process that made many ways to mess up the pay-per-click system. The simplest way to do this is your competitor’s will have someone to click on your ads so many times. As a result, you will pay bill to search engines or ad agencies as per number of clicks besides your campaign scope reduced.

In a step to counter click fraud, Business.com, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are approved by IAB in search audits for the first time. It is a significant development, as the three major search engines have more than 95% of the search market.

IAB also released Click Measurement Guidelines that explain how to define and evaluate suitable clicks from fraudulent clicks and how to remove fraudulent clicks. These guidelines also provide parameters to the companies for truthful business through Cost-Per-Click advertising.

With the increase of vigilance on click fraud, Q2 fraud rates dropped by 3.5% compared to previous year, according to Click Fraud Index provided by Click Forensics. Q4 of 2008 recorded the highest rate of global click fraud with 17.1%. However, the two quarters of 2009 i.e. Q1 and Q2 have seen a reduction consecutively. Q1 and Q2 of 2009 recorded 13.8% and 12.7% ofclick fraud respectively.

According to the report, during Q2 2009, Click fraud traffic from sophisticated sources and scripted programs increased. This included growth in publisher collusion fraud on ad networks. In Q1, fraud from malicious scripted programs increased. Unlike botnets or malware, these simple JavaScript programs execute on a page view or site visit. Ad networks were especially vulnerable to these attacks during the quarter.

In Q1 2009, Canada, United Kingdom and Germany are the originating countries for major share of click fraud other than U.S.

However, according to Anchor Intelligence, a similar source reported contradicting numbers that depict an increase in click fraud. The report expects 2009 to see more click fraud despite best efforts.

Click fraud is becoming the bane of Internet advertising. The fact that, click fraud may have been as high as $4.35 billion in 2008 if none of the fraud is detected, signifies the urgent need to address the menace. Though some may think that acting againstclick fraud is against the benefits of search engines, every party involved in the Internet Marketing Industry should do their part to eradicate click fraud.

Category: Advertising  Tags: , , , , , , , , ,  2 Comments

The Worldwide Online Ad Spending Continuous To Drop

By admin
23
Mar 2010

The worldwide online adverting market dropped by five percent in Q2 of 2009 when compared to corresponding period in 2008, according to market research company IDC. The total online ad spending in Q2 of 2009 is $13.9 billion dropped from $14.7 billion in Q2 of 2008. Among the online advertising categories such as online ads, display ads and classifieds, search ads are the least affected.

The vital region for the global market was US online advertising market that dropped 7 percent during Q2 year over year. The US online ad market is now worth $6.2 billion in Q2 of 2009, while it was $6.6 billion in the corresponding period last year. The only region that remained positive globally was Asia/Pacific and Japan with slight gains.

The effect of economic crisis on various online advertising like social media, mobile ads and display ads are as follows:
•    Advertisers are shifting their ad budgets from digital media to most proven traditional Medias such as television ads, newspaper ads.
•    The search advertising became a dominant player in the entire Internet advertising. It captured one-third of all annual online ad spending worldwide despite global economic downturn.
•    Display ads will be the next largest tool in online advertising. It is expected to capture 20 percent of all annual ads spending worldwide by 2011, followed by Classified ads with 19 percent.

The factors that support online ad spending:
•    Improved ad budgets
•    High cost for advertising in other medias
•    More companies are including Internet advertising as a part of their total advertising campaign
•    Ad budgets tilt from other medias to Internet

Mobile Internet ad spending will increase $2 billion by 2014 from $500 million in 2009, according to Juniper Research. The main reason behind this is, the growth driven by new markets such as China and India where fixed line Internet access is less. The growing mobile Internet access across the globe irrespective of the economies is likely to fuel the further growth of online ad spending.

However, Internet advertising received only a small portion of marketing budgets in the current season, it is expected to improve in the coming years. In a similar report, GroupM predicts that if the worldwide ad spending reaches to $58.17 billion by the end of 2009, online advertising will be 13.2 percent of total ad spending and it will further increase up to 14.6 percent in 2010.

Because of the global economic crisis, marketers decreased ad budgets to advertise on new social networking. The impact of economic crisis on online advertising industry specifically and the advertising industry overall is expected to continue in 2010 as well. In this period, the traditional media advertising is most likely to be affected than online advertising.

Category: Advertising  Tags: , , , , , , , , ,  One Comment

Creative Uses For Streaming Audio On Your Website

By admin
23
Mar 2010

The time is now to consider adding audio to your website or blog. Each person will have their own reasons for wanting a website that talks or sings. Use your imagination and you will find many uses for streaming audio. There has never been a better time to get started adding streaming audio to your web site, audio can take your website to new heights. Here are some different ways to use audio to get your thought process flowing.

Personal: Adding streaming audio to your personal site makes a lot of sense and can be a whole lot of fun. Image your loved one opening your blog to find audio buttons there. Upon clicking the buttons she hears happy birthday in your voice coming over her computer speakers. Audio can be a lot of fun when used in a creative manner.

Newsletter: Sending out your newsletter with links back to your web page with streaming audio on it should increase your conversion rates. This type of multimedia is pretty new and should make your subscribers orders come alive. With any luck this technique will help you hold on to all of your subscribers.

CD Sales: Musicians and bands now have a worldwide audience to sell their music to. No longer does a local band need to stay that way. You can sell your Cds anywhere.

Book Your Band: Adding audio buttons to your band web site is an excellent way to get more gigs. You can save a lot of money by no longer having to send out promo kits. Send the promoter that is considering hiring your band to the band website to listen to your music rather than mailing out a CD.

Products: Audio can make your products worth a lot more money. The products you create can be expanded with streaming audio. Simply getting a small recording set up and reading the book and recording it can easily add profits to the books you have written. The audio version of your product can be offered as a bonus or you can up sell your customer for added profits.

Audio on your website will help make you a leader, people that visit your website or blog will feel like they know you after hearing your voice. They will become familiar with the way you pronounce your words and your unique personality. This can be a big step in gaining people’s trust. Streaming audio is a great way to make your web site different and unique. Setting yourself apart is usually a good thing to achieve.

Category: Video  Tags: , , , , , , , , ,  4 Comments

Watch Live TV For Free Online – Get Connected Today

By admin
23
Mar 2010

There is a lot of talk at the moment about whether it is possible and legal to watch live tv for free online or not. There are a plethora of sites out there that offer this possibility, but it seems hard to imagine that you can gain access to thousands of channels using just your computer.

It must be said now that 95% of sites that offer this capability do not deliver what they promise. They claim to supply you with XYZ, and after you have taken out your credit card and paid, you are bitterly disappointed with the lack of channels and the quality.
However, they are a small number of sites that can give you what you want, that being live TV for free from your computer.
If you are new to the opportunity of watching live TV for free online, let me cover a few areas to clear your mind of any questions you might have:

What You Need

When you sign up to a creditable web site offering such a service, you will need to download their software which is usually very small and does not take more than a few minutes to install.

Once you have done this, all you will actually need from then on is a computer, whether it is a PC or a laptop, preferably a fast internet connection, and a free media player package like RealPlayer or MediaPlayer which you can download for free from their relevant sites.

With regards to an internet connection, the faster the internet connection the faster you will stream. As a result, you will receive a higher quality picture and sound to go with it. With a decent connection, you can watch fantastic television on full screen. The capability is there.

It will work from a dial-up computer, and you can still enjoy the benefits but broadband speed or higher is certainly recommended in order to receive full value.

Financial Aspect

99% of the time, you will be asked to pay a small one time fee, and from then on you will be able to watch TV for free. Do not sign up to web sites that want you to pay a subscription charge or monthly fees because that is not how the industry mainly charges for such services.
Sites asking for ongoing fees are, to be frank, being greedy.

The Freedom It Offers You

If you have picked the right package (very tricky these days), then being able to watch TV online offers you substantial freedom and other benefits. You can watch exactly what you would like to watch without others changing the channel. This is especially useful when you have a family, and each person wants to watch something different.

If you do not actually have cable or satellite in the first place, then such a service gives you this for a very small fee. With technology these days, you can connect yourcomputer to the television easily and reap the same rewards as you would if you were paying high monthly fees for cable!

There are many more benefits which I am sure you can think of, but ultimately it comes down to more freedom and flexibility for you.

Category: Video  Tags: , , , , , , , , ,  5 Comments