TABLE OF CONTENTS When putting together any kind of plan or strategy a full understanding of the space in which a company is going to compete is essential. In the context of a marketing plan, activities in this area would be referred to as the situational analysis and as the search industry is no different to any other medium it is as important.
In Chapter 9 the situational analysis will be studied in detail but for now the variables needed for research will be highlighted.
Differing from the tools to measure an individual company's success there are tools in the space that allow a company to determine the parameters, such as competitive nature and price of clicks, that can then be modeled into strategic tools.
Most of the cost per click analysis is performed for the Paid For Placement (PFP) space. For Paid For Inclusion (PFI) there is a rate card price and the engines can determine price.
For the PFP space each of the engines will provide access to bid prices for search terms; this is a mandatory variable for an auction-based system as it is the market that controls the search price and therefore complete visibility of pricing is necessary. Each of the major PFP engines (eSpotting, FindWhat, Overture and Google) all have mechanisms for researching both the keywords available within the space and how much each click in each of the top positions is going for. Successful research of...
