Advertising Online - A Guide to Successful Market Penetration Part One: Why Internet Advertising

Online advertising in the past year has proven to be no longer an option, but a requirement. With billions of pages on the web, companies are increasingly feeling the pressure to advertise online to bolster corporate presence, B2B and B2C revenues and to also turn their websites into sources for acquiring client information. Indeed, statistics show that more and more business is being conducted online, and a recent study conducted from Ernst and Young reveals that 74% of Americans purchased online in the last year.

Accordingly, of all Internet users in the US, 94% of them query search engines to find information on the Web (Nielson-Net Ratings). Even more appealing is the fact that 81% of people querying search engines find the information every time they search (NPD). Considering these numbers and how relatively inexpensive and risk free Internet advertising is compared to other types of traditional media, it is a wonder why more businesses are not optimizing their sites on search engines (aka SEO � Search Engine Optimization) to bolster online presence.

This is Part One of a three-part article on successful online advertising.

Part Two will discuss Search Engine Strategies.

Part Three will cover Geographical Targeting and Fraud Prevention Programs. 

Reaching the ever-increasing number of online users is critical to complementing your offline advertising efforts as well as establishing your corporate presence on the net. Corporate websites should be information rich for both returning users and new users. They should also be a platform for your company's values and offering. Attracting your clients, or potential business partners to your website is therefore the key to not only forging long-term relationships, but also bolstering online sales.

CEOs and marketing directors need to acknowledge the power of search engine marketing. It's one of the most cost-effective marketing tools available, yet most companies spend little on search engine optimization. In a recent study from Marketing Sherpa, "more than 90 percent of the Fortune 100's websites not optimized properly". This is a striking statistic when considering that next to email, search engines are the most widely used application on the Internet (Market Leap).

A fully integrated marketing campaign should therefore include aggressive Internet advertising, which consists of listings on search engines, portals, directories and banners on strategic portals and large sites. Most importantly, listing your site on search engines with a broad reach is important to expose your product and/or services. Search engines will provide the technology to bring your corporation to people who are actively looking for your solution. And since over 80% of web site traffic is guided by search engines (Forrester Research), the question remains: how do you use search engines effectively in order to draw clients, partners and industry experts to your site?

To support online initiatives, listing and ranking high on search engines is a critical step towards garnishing success. In the industry, the top 10 results receive approximately 80% more traffic than those in positions 11-30 (I search). Now, how do you achieve that top rank?

There are various ways to approach getting top listing with the large search properties. Some sites use specific keywords and phrases to allow large indexing engines to recognize the validity of the site to the users, some also purchase relevant keywords and phrases from content suppliers who feed this information to the large search properties. Most of these content suppliers charge per referral.

There are many different types of pricing structures, the two most popular being bidding and CPC. The later version charges only when a user clicks on the search result (CPC- Cost per Click- Model), and redirects the user to your site. There is little risk in comparison to traditional advertising media, which charges strictly on demographics, circulation, and the likelihood of how many people will see or hear your message. Paying a content supplier on a "cost per click" referral is akin to having someone deliver a bus load of people to your store and charging you pennies for every potential customer who steps through the door. In this scenario, even if two people purchase, you will have been successful in your online marketing efforts. 

Why Enterprise Application Search Is Crucial to Your ERP System

al. We are now at the crossroads where the technology that solves this problem is catching up with the ERP tools we use in our businesses. Two parallel approaches have developed to offer us different solutions—enterprise search and enterprise application search (EAS). Enterprise search allows full search of a broad spectrum of data sources ranging from content of enterprise applications, e-mail servers, intranets, and other structured or unstructured content. EAS, on the other hand, is a search function built directly into an enterprise application, allowing context-specific and general searches within the application.

Let's explore these two approaches and what they mean for those of us responsible for making the most of ERP investments.

An Historic Crossroads

Historical dates are divided into years BC, or before the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, and AD, or Anno Domini. It is not our intention to debate the mistakes that the monk Dionysius Exiguus made in arriving at the date of transition between eras, or whether the more neutral terms BCE and CE (for Before the Common Era and Common Era, respectively) are preferable. Instead, we will focus on the passing of two other historic landmarks and their implications for enterprise computing.

The first date we will focus on is the advent of the Internet, which changed computing forever.

When the US Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) and open architecture networking first gave rise to the galactic network that we now refer to as the Internet, life online was very different than it is today. We can refer to this period as BG, or Before Google (although perhaps it would be more correct to refer to this period as BAV, or Before AltaVista). This new era started at the second date of importance here—the advent of full-text Internet search, which changed the Internet forever. In August of 1995, technicians at Digital Equipment Corporation's Western Research Lab completed the initial index of the entire Web, allowing full-text search of ten million Web pages. AltaVista, the first globally successful, text-based search engine was born—only later to be eclipsed by Google.

What is so earth-shattering about that moment? In the early days of the Web, bookmarks, portals, and Web indexes were very important in order to find what you were looking for online. The Internet had succeeded in connecting countless remote computer networks, but in order to find anything, paradoxically, you had to first know where it was. Many sites on the Internet prominently featured links pages, which were designed to be reference points thoughtfully provided by the sites' owners to make it easier for their visitors to find specific resources online. Earlier search tools required site owners to register their web sites, and then, only very narrow keywords would be searchable rather than the entire site contents. So using an early search engine, you might, at best, be able to find a site about sports history, but not specific information on how many home runs baseball great Hank Aaron accumulated during his career (775) or the number of goals Brazilian soccer great Ronaldo has scored in World Cup play. You could find sites containing information on industrial equipment, but probably would have trouble finding “for sale” listings for a used dewatering screen for your mining operation, or a rotary die cutter for your printing and converting company.

Searching within Your Own Systems

The ability to find things on the Web using powerful search tools like Google and AltaVista is a tremendous time-saver. Similar time-saving and efficiencies can also be achieved by expediting the search for information within your company's own systems—specifically, within an enterprise application.

An enterprise application is in some ways similar to the public Internet, as it connects computer data throughout your company, uniting islands of information into a single data universe. And like the Internet, the application features some type of navigation structure to help you surf between the different screens and functions. These tabs or hierarchy of screens are the equivalent of the bookmarks we used to have to navigate the Internet. To run a query on your enterprise data, you go to the correct form and run a query in the appropriate field or dialog. Just like in the early days of the Internet, to find information in your business application, you need to know where it is.

In searching for information about a particular company, you need to know whether the information you want is attached to records regarding individual companies, records on people who work for the company, or records of active projects having to do with the company. With enough knowledge of precisely how you have configured your enterprise application, you can find what you are looking for.

This search method is probably an acceptable way for frequent users of a system to search for purchase orders, or to search by supplier or customer information. But it does not work that well for the occasional user of a system, or even for a heavy user of the system who is searching an application in an area with which he or she is not intimately familiar. Because enterprise applications are so broad and cover so many different disciplines within a company, it is hard for any one person to have a thorough understanding of even a majority of an application's functionality.

That is why application vendors are coming to market with various search solutions for use within their products. There are two distinct approaches to delivering this critical search function.

In short, EAS is a tool that is tightly integrated with an enterprise application, and it delivers targeted search results from within the application's knowledge base. Enterprise search is a product marketed separately from the application, and searches data both inside and outside of the application.

Enterprise search is the approach taken by a number of technology vendors, including Google, which has launched its Google Search Appliance and Google Mini products. SAP and Oracle are each marketing their search tools as a separate product to locate data not only within their own applications, but elsewhere on a company's intranet and databases. Other vendors, including Thunderstone, Index Engines, Autonomy, Convera, FAST Search, and Verity, focus more exclusively on search tools rather than the enterprise applications they are to work with. All of these offerings can be considered examples of pure enterprise search. They are generic search appliances for use within an enterprise. The alternative strategy, EAS, involves a search function more tightly integrated with a specific application, and is a critical feature to look for in an enterprise application.

Going Further with EAS

For various reasons, very few enterprise application vendors are focusing first and foremost on delivering EAS, which offers Google-like search capabilities strictly within their own suites of applications. Some vendors may have a hard time engineering this feature into their products because they own a large number of different applications, all with different architectures. Other vendors may find that offering EAS is not an attractive option for them given their business models, as they prefer to develop broad technology stacks beyond the scope of their applications; so developing a stand-alone search appliance is more appropriate for them.