Search Engine Marketing a Hit Among Advertisers

BUSINESSES spent RM58.2 million on Search Engine Marketing targeted at Malaysian users in 2006, of which RM10.7 million came from Malaysian firms, a study has revealed.

The study was conducted by Pinstorm Technology, an international leader in Search Engine Marketing, in association with ADOI Magazine.

Search Engine Marketing, or SEM, is a set of marketing methods to increase the visibility of a website in search engine result pages. Unlike other advertising media, SEM allows the advertiser to exactly specify and reach their target audience.

Pinstorm chief executive officer and founder Mahesh Murthy said SEM has come closest to delivering the right advertisement to the right person at the right time.

“When a user enters keywords to perform a search they are letting the search engine know their interests. Based on these keywords the search engine dynamically displays relevant ads along with the search results,” he said in a statement.

The study found that that 14,500 advertisers target Malaysian consumers online, which is more than the number of advertisers on TV, indicating that, although hardly a couple of years old, the SEM industry in Malaysia has matured by leaps and bounds.

Malaysian users alone make 700 million searches a month and Google has 92 per cent share of the search volume followed by Yahoo with 8 per cent, and the number is growing as people research choices, products and prices for every sort of buying decision – from travel, banking and insurance to education and career choices.

The financial services industry (FSI) led in the Internet marketing with 42 per cent of the market spend followed by travel (13 per cent) and technology (10 per cent), while the top five global spenders in Malaysia were Dell, everyrule.com, eBay, Google and Yahoo.

Companies like Google and Yahoo allow marketers to bid on any kind of keywords and those willing to pay the most have their ads displayed first.

For the most popular keywords this can raise the cost of advertising to several US dollars per click.

In Malaysia, where the SEM is still not fully utilised by marketers, the prices are somewhat lower. The lowest cost per click paid by a Malaysian advertiser was RM0.32, and the highest RM7.18.

Pinstom recently presented the full findings of this study to 100 leading Malaysian marketers at South-East Asia’s first ever SEM seminar in Kuala Lumpur.

The full report can be downloaded from www.pinstorm.com

Pinstorm is based in Mumbai with offices in New Delhi, Singapore and Malaysia.

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