SEM is becoming the main marketing mode of e-commerce

Remember just contact with the search engine is the 04 Dangdang in charge of network marketing, then listen to Alibaba's friends on the importance of the search engine, and then recommend to the company to promote the adoption of Baidu, because at that time we are also accustomed to buy the fixed position of the portal site, Baidu is almost unknown, So the leaders didn't pay much attention to the discussion. It was not until 05 that our President went to the United States to study the market, and after contacting some American investors, these investors were surprised to promote new customers when they were not using search engines at low prices. That is, since then, when began to consider the focus of the search engine advertising, development to last year when I left office, search has become when the CPS Alliance after the largest scale of the promotion form, peak size per month to millions, and order costs are often other online advertising costs of 1/10 or even lower.

The rapid rise of search engine marketing

Amazon from 04 onwards, the basic use of CPS Alliance and SEM of these two forms of online advertising, the network of brand advertising basically did not, by its impact, the domestic excellent Amazon's external promotional form is also only the alliance and search engines. According to our company's search engine marketing department monitoring, the Network of Excellence is now monthly on the search engine on the amount of nearly 1.5 million, search engine brought new customers accounted for the total number of new customers about 15%, the immediate cost of bringing new customers around 30 yuan.

Search engines have actually become the main source of traffic for domestic e-commerce sites. According to Eric's Iuser tracker statistics, May 07, the three major search engines (Baidu, Google, Yahoo) to Taobao's flow of traffic accounted for Taobao's foreign traffic ratio of nearly 60% (of course, more of this is the flow of natural search). And the search engine brings more traffic than the conversion rate will be much higher, in general E-commerce sites, search engines bring 100 clicks can be transformed into an order, and not the search engine may have 300-500 clicks to be converted into an order. Therefore, search engine marketing has become the main traffic source of E-commerce, has actually become a new portal and new media.

The efficiency of SEM is so high that it is expected to be favored by mature e-commerce companies. Let me briefly introduce the characteristics of search engine marketing: First of all, the search crowd, the target audience of large users, the main domestic search engine coverage of the number of users in the past six months before more than 50 million, Baidu Web day search requests in the number of 1 years ago more than 300 million times, so the search engine can form a certain scale ; user-initiated demand matching, can be to a certain extent, the exact matching of the crowd and region, bringing users are very targeted users, so the flow rate of conversion is high, and from the form of advertising, in search results and search requests related to the business information, than the traditional online advertising content, More easily accepted by netizens, and the search engine gathers hundreds of millions of times a day long tail search request volume just satisfies many e-commerce enterprise many long tail variety of marketing; In addition, the budget can be fully controlled, the bidding strength and length can be flexibly controlled, implemented quickly, the effect of sustainable optimization, These can be fully guaranteed to obtain a higher Roi.sem has become the most accurate, most effective one of the marketing means, but also can be large-scale delivery of the important network marketing channels.

Can the scale of launch continue to expand?

However, search engine marketing is a very skilled, experience demanding a very high job, unlike the launch of Brand advertising, a brand creative can be in all advertising positions for one months. The enterprise that attaches importance to SEM and takes it as the main promotion form also encounters many problems. Here I focus on the question that has been the most troubling of my time: how to scale up with a certain ROI.

First, put it on Google. Because Google's ads only appear on the right side (unless a very high click on the left side of the ads will be in the form of a sponsor connection), advertising and the left side of the content is completely isolated, so that users can hardly pay attention to the right ads, although Google's market share and Baidu only a few times But in the product word (title or commodity name) to promote the effect, Google brought about by the size and Baidu is nearly dozens of times times worse.

In fact, the real size of Google is often those brand words, for example, "Dangdang" "Taobao" and so on, and Google in the domestic brand word protection process is too complex, so many companies take the opportunity to buy competitors brand words, such as now search "Dangdang", the right on the emergence of excellence, Lancome, Jingdong advertising and so on, so that enterprises must buy their own brand words and competitors brand words (brand words can often account for more than half of the effect of the Google launch, but these words are not what you want to buy, because if no one buys, the natural search results are in front of you too.

Also, Google's advertising ranking is mainly quality * Click the unit price, because Google is very focused on the search customer experience, so the coefficient of quality changes very large, and the optimization cycle is particularly long. On Google you will find it difficult to expand the scale in a short period of time, unless you continue to optimize the number of brand words, competition words and industry generic words optimized to the left, so that the scale has been greatly improved, and rashly increase the number of products, it is easy to lead to the cost of advertising orders 2-3 times Or the cost is high and the effect changes little, because these words are difficult to optimize to the left.

Baidu's situation is slightly different. Baidu bid ranked ads because it appears on the left-hand side of the search results above, the transformation of advertising is very high, while the flow of Baidu is so high, in Baidu very easy to expand the scale. Baidu also protects well-known brands, you basically do not have to spend the budget on the brand words, the effect is often tens of thousands of hundreds of thousands of of the product words (but you have to be careful, many small companies will secretly buy your brand words in accordance with the sales to you in the form of CPS sold to you, so that you lost a large amount of expenses).

In Baidu to expand the scale often has three levels can break through, the first is to increase the number of products to promote the number and keywords, as long as the relevant keywords, the scale can continue to grow, this is very suitable for many products enterprises; the second level is to improve the sorting of words Generally ranked in the first row in the second size will be 3.5 times times larger, so if you want to improve a lot, you have to have the courage to the overall ranking of your ads in front of the competition; the third level is the size of the word and the size of the budget to a certain extent, we should strive to get Baidu headquarters to optimize the support of the team. But this also has certain difficulty, I 1 years ago in the Dangdang in charge of the search engine launch, in the Baidu bid scale has reached the monthly millions, brand advertising is millions, but also want to expand the size of the auction advertising, want to let Baidu Headquarters optimization team to provide better tools, stronger experience guidance, Better service and better price policy, looking for them for 3 months no one to pay attention to, and then I send their COO mail, I hope to get their greater support, COO back to the Mail said will be scheduled to deal with the priority, it is said that 20 million other customers they should be valued, but 2 months after no one. Originally I want to send the mail to Robin Li to seek support, but I also think the whole system of Baidu mode is the service a hundred thousand of small and medium-sized enterprises, in the company's mechanism may not serve the big customer's process and ability, looked for also useless, therefore endured continues to carry on according to the previous scale. (But I heard that 08 Baidu to the major customers as the company's key strategy)

At the same time, the domestic large e-commerce advertisers in the search engine marketing process, in addition to the limited size, the market lacks the management of large-scale keywords, multi-level and multi-angle optimization, demand matching, dissemination of content management, price and budget management of good management tools, which also increases the difficulty of delivery and the risk of sudden increase in costs, The development of SEM is limited to some extent because of the single optimization method. And these enterprises do not now have to carry out the development of self-management tools power and ability.

Of course, search engine marketing is far more than I said above so easy, I just picked a few more important points to introduce it. Our company is responsible for SEM, there are 7-8 of people's team, every day to summarize the experience and skills of SEM promotion, and the experience of products and tools, every day there are many small skills found. The scale of our own product search engine expanded 5 times times last month, and the goal for this month continues to grow by 3 times times, while creating different promotional and promotional models for customers from different industries.

Third-party SEM opportunities

Because of the efficiency of search engines, high conversion rate, low promotion cost, search engine promotion in a certain degree after the expansion of the scale is easy to limit; and search engine is a very high threshold of experience and skills, the market has no good tools, search engine providers are not able to provide more professional services And not every company will be professional sem promotion of talent, which gives professional third-party SEM company to provide the opportunity. Many companies have been providing such services, including good yes, long extension interaction, Yi Ma, Shanghai Tatsu smell, just enter the domestic adsage and so on.

But search engine marketing is a not fully mature market, leading to SEM optimization market is not too many norms, and eventually led to the industry is more chaotic. First of all, the third party SEM optimization does not form a mature industry general charging mode, in the end is the collection of service fees or to increase the efficiency of delivery to bring the value of the split? Have no pat, which limits the development of the industry to a certain extent; second, the industry is also very low profits, can receive the cost of 5% has been very good, and this part is difficult to get back from Baidu Google, so trapped in short-term profits, and can not really for the long-term strategy of customers to consider; The lack of talent in the entire industry, these enterprises are also lack of real implementation experience and real cases, sem lack of experience, but also lack of good tools; Finally, the domestic mainstream search engine, especially Baidu in the API open progress relatively slow, API open process need more time preparation, Therefore, the third party companies in the data interface and system interface encountered greater difficulties.

Make a final summary, because of its high efficiency, high conversion rate and low cost, the search engine has become the mainstream marketing mode of E-commerce, but it is limited by the service level of the tool, experience and search engine provider, and the third party optimization company has not invested high because of the lack of profit, To a certain extent, limited the development of the industry and how to solve these problems, but also need to look at Baidu's main search engine Company's strategy for the big customers and the third party professional firms strategy.