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9.5 Online Advertising Methods: From E-Mail to SEO and Video Ads 275

E-mail can also be sent to mobile devices. Mobile phones, advertisement strategy. In fact, more than 90% of Google’s
in particular, offer advertisers a real chance to advertise revenue is generated from advertising (2014).
interactively and on a one-to-one basis with consumers—
anytime, anyplace. Now e-mail ads are targeted to individu- URL Listing
als based not only on their user profiles but also on their
physical location at any point in time. Most search engine companies allow businesses to submit
their URLs for free, so that these URLs can be searched for by
E-Mail Hoaxes the search engines. Search engine spiders crawl through each
E-mail hoaxes are very popular; some of them have been site, indexing its content and links. The site is then included as
going on for years (e.g., Neiman Marcus’s cookie recipe, the a candidate for future searches. Because there are quite a few
Nigerian Letters, the Homeland Security cashier check search engines, advertisers who use this method should regis-
hoax). Some of these are scams. For details, see U.S. Federal ter their URL with as many proper search engines as possible.
Trade Commission (ftc.gov). In some cases, URLs may be searched even if they are not
submitted to the search engines.
Fraud The major advantage of URL listing is that the listing can
Fraud may happen in e-mail ads. For example, a person may be very relevant to the subject of the search. This is the key
receive an e-mail stating that his or her credit card number is to Google’s success, as we will describe later. The second
invalid or that his or her MSN service will be terminated major advantage of using a search engine as an advertising
unless another credit card number is provided by the recipi- tool is that it is free. Anyone can submit a URL to a search
ent of the mail. For protection against such fraudulent prac- engine and be listed. People searching for a certain product
tices, see scambusters.org. will receive a list of sites that mention the products.
However, the URL method has several drawbacks. The
major one is that it is difficult (or expensive) to get your ad to
Search Engine Advertisement appear in a good location on the list generated by the search
and Optimization engine. Search engines find a very large number of related
Web pages for each inquiry made by a user. The chance that
Search engines are a good mechanism for most people to a specific company’s site will be found and included at the
find information, and therefore, a good platform for online top of a search engine’s display list (say, in the first 10 items)
advertising. Placing online ads on Web pages that show is very slim. Hence, many companies provide a service to
results from querying a search engine is known as search help advertisers improve the location (usually targeting the
advertising. If the search result includes your company and first page) of the search result. This is called search engine
product, it is a free advertisement for you. The problem is optimization.
that the results of a search may include thousands of items,
and your product may be not on the first or second page of Search Engine Optimization
the results. Note that, search advertising includes mobile
search and social network search (see pipl.com). Two major Search engine optimization (SEO) is a process that improves
forms of search engine advertising are keyword advertising the visibility of a company or brands on the results page dis-
and URL listing. played by a search engine. Ideally, the results should be in
the top 5–10 on the first page. Companies hire search opti-
Keyword Advertising mizers or try to optimize by themselves. SEO can increase
the number of visitors to a website, and therefore compa-
Keyword advertising links the appearance of ads with key- nies are willing to pay for this service. For how to do this,
words specified by the advertiser. It includes “pay per click.” see Harris (2014). SEO is performed in all types of online
Businesses select the keywords to which they want their searches, including video search, social network search,
advertisements to be searched and matched. Advertisements and image search. According to Google AdWords, “to get
appear on the screen along with the search results when your ads to appear when people search for your product or
the chosen keywords are searched. This can substantially service, the keywords you choose need to match the words
increase the likelihood that the advertisement will be viewed or phrases that people use, or should be related to the con-
and possibly acted on because of its high relevance to user tent of the websites your customers visit.” Figure 9.3 shows
interests. For an example of how this works, see google.com/ the general process of SEO. For further details, see
adwords/how-it-works/ads-on-google.html. Google is using Amerland (2015) and blog.kissmetrics.com/minimalist-
two major methods (to be described later) to implement its seo.