Comments on: Search Engine Marketing is PVP

By: What Gets Clicked, What Gets Read | Contoleon.com

What Gets Clicked, What Gets Read | Contoleon.com — Sat, 02 Jul 2011 22:55:04 +0000

[...] Search Engine Marketing is PVP [...]

By: admin

admin — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 13:18:22 +0000

I am glad that you liked it.

The interesting thing I have seen with SEM is that competition is not always obvious. Impressions and clicks at the campaign or even keyword level may not reveal geographical or specific query based competition that may be targeting productive traffic.

Measure, test, measure is pretty much vital. With a lot of SEM, the decisions people make are often based on a model and a collection of assumptions. It is as important to assess these as it is the specific tactics that are used. This is especially true in a market like Adwords, where the tools available to the advertisers change frequently.

The defender in SEM should actually have the advantage, assuming that they have been paying attention to the data that they collect. It is the advertiser entering the market that has to accept a higher level of risk as they start to build a picture of the query space.

Again, thanks for the comment, it was pretty interesting.

By: Jeff Polley

Jeff Polley — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 12:51:19 +0000

An interesting analogy!
I tend to think as PVP as an offender/defender situation, often where the defender is caught unawares – perhaps marketing is more a case of know thy enemy.
As a student of aikido though, I would say that the defender is not necessarily at a disadvantage. Learn to take the attacker’s strength, and turn it against them.
Observe, act & assess translates to measure, test, measure, which is surely at the very heart of marketing. Again, a good analogy.
Thanks for the piece.