Search Engine Marketing / Internet Marketing

Internet Marketing is complicated. There are a lot of players, a lot of rules and a lot of cheating. There are few laws, no regulations, and the industry is young enough that very few SEM companies have any sort of track record that indicates integrity or customer satisfaction. While much of the complexity will inevitably be overlayed with fancy marketing prose and SEM packages that will be integrated with other types of marketing and advertising, it's important for you to have a basic understanding of how the industry works:

Typically, an SEM promoter will contact a potential customer (often after a prequalification process that involves surfing the customer site to check for suitability, clean HTML, etc) and offer their services. These services consist of the generation and management of an SEM campaign, an implicit promise of significant qualified visitors to the customer site, and may include website modifications (tacitly to make the site more 'engine friendly'.) These services are generally pitched with a setup fee of some kind, and an agreed-upon click fee, or 'CPC' (Cost per Click) to be paid to the promoter every time someone clicks on a link to the customer's site - at least, the links that the promoter is responsible for. The CPC is used to pay the engines for their fees associated with paid placement (where applicable), and also cover costs and a small profit for the promoter. During this process, many promoters will 'color' the facts and their abilities in order to close the deal:

"Certainly, Mr. Johnson, we can guarantee you a top-10 spot on Google; we can guarantee you the top spot for your business if you'd like to consider our premium package..."

"Mr. Jones, only SEMSupermen™ can guarantee you a direct feed into Google, thus assuring you the highest placement possible."

"Why, no, Mr. Fitzhume, our organization would never consider using unapproved methods of getting you ranked (like cloaked pages or dynamic filler or redirect tricks, etc) - those are what other companies do! Tricks like those can get you permanently delisted from Google and the other engines fast!"

"Mr. Smith, my web marketing strategists tell me that your site simply can't benefit from an SEM campaign at this time unless you make some serious changes. We do happen to have a special on website renovation and engine compliance going on right now, however. Let me get you over to one of our specialists..."

"Because of our special relationships with Google, MSN, Yahoo, Inktomi, and all the other major players I can think of, we're in a position to offer you both better traffic and a cheaper CPC than anyone in the market!"

When you hear the above, don't believe a word of it -- do your own web research, have your tech guys look into prospective SEM promoters (Why not? You're paying them all that money - make them do something besides play freecell and surf slashdot.org). If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

After completing the agreement, the promoter will generally analyse the customer website and products, and create the SEM campaign, which will be composed of (Usually multiple) URL's from the customer website with associated keywords that can be inserted into the major search engines. The search engines occasionally run programs called 'spiders' that will explore all the recent sites that promoters (and others) have submitted, extract the relevant data from the sites, and store the data, to be displayed when users search for certain information. The upshot of this process is, if a promoter has done his job, when someone searches an engine for an item or service the customer sells, a link to the customer will appear in the result set - preferably near or at the top of the results. As people click on these links and are delivered to the customer website, some of these users will make purchases from their customer. Got it?

That sounds fairly simple. What's the catch?

The catch is, there are no checks and balances. Many promoters are sincere, and just want to deliver a quality product and get paid. Because there are no checks and balances, however, problems can occur:

Promoter A pays their sales force by commissions based on total CPC's for each customer contract closed. Any member of the sales force can set up a script to bang a customer URL several times a minute, all night long - this results in thousands of bad hits, no conversions, and angry customers for the promoter as well as inflated billing for the customer.
Sales guy B leaves his SEM company, and decides to do SEM freelance. He contacts many customers that belong to his former employer, and explains that now that he is no longer there to 'fine tune' their campaigns, their conversions will drop off - they should jump ship and sign on with him. For the customers that stay with the promoter, B can set up a process to send bad packets to the promoter traffic hub, increasing costs for these customers while reducing conversions. This rapidly makes the existing promoter look bad and reduces the credibility of SEM offerings overall.
Organization O contracts an SEM specialist to do an SEM campaign. During the course of the campaign, O suspects that monies spent on paid inclusion for higher-priced engines were improperly allocated, resulting in reduced or missing traffic from certain engines. Organization O decides to look into this - what can they do? Nothing - they have only their own conversion data and the reports the promoter sends them.

All of these issues are very real problems in the SEM industry today. customers have to take the Promoters word on traffic - their only recourse is to retain the log files of the promoter, and reconcile these with their own server logs. This can be very time consuming, and even when discrepancies are found, there's often no defined way to easily communicate this information back to a promoter in a succinct manner (resulting in a credit). Promoters have no third-party traffic certification authority, and when customer after customer complains about questionable or bad traffic, it's simply the promoters word against the customer - and the customer is always right! This means that more often than not, a promoter will bill for traffic that should have been caught and flagged as bad - spiders, double clicks, etc. This is traffic that the engine will almost certainly bill the promoter for, and the cost is usually passed on to the customer.

These issues can be addressed by inserting an unbiased third-party traffic analysis platform into the process. That's where TrueStream comes in.

Back to the TrueStream homepage.