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4.3.2 Search Engine Advertising (SEA)
4.3.2.1 Overview about SEA
The objective of SEA is to create qualified traffic on a web page without the efforts of other free online marketing tools which will be discussed in the following chapters. SEA is paid adverts which are placed in the big search engines like Google or Yahoo. Search engine marketing means that a search engine operator places an advert with a specified keyword. Thus the advert can be tailored to the actual needs of a customer. If a search engine user searches for a term he gets two types of results: The paid and the unpaid results. If the keyword of the paid advert well-specifies there is rarely wastage. Another advantage is that the search engines online charge for clicking on the adverts. This greatly decreases the risk of project failure (Peschke, 2010).
There is also the possibility of placing adverts in the content network of a search engine. This is similar to affiliate marketing where small texts are placed between the content of a web page. The adverts are automatically placed depending on the content of the web page. There are pure content networks like Miva as well (Miva, 2010).
Adverts are placed in a search engine ranking page (SERP) depending on some ranking factors. Basically it works like an auction. But the highest bid is not automatically on the first position. There are some other factors like the relevance or the click-through-rate (CTR) which plays a role. This shall animates companies to make relevant adverts to make sure that the quality of the adverts is always high. For Google this is the only source of revenue, so it needs to make sure that the quality is always very high (Google, 2010a).