Benefits & Risks of
Sponsored Search Marketing

Sponsored Search Marketing offers your firm a number of unique benefits compared to other marketing techniques. They are:

• High transparency. Sponsored Search Marketing offers high transparency at all stages of the Internet Marketing Cycle. Precise accounting of impressions, click-throughs, and conversions are typically available within hours of occurrence.
• Tight coupling. Sponsored Search Marketing offers tight coupling between all stages of the Internet Marketing Cycle. Changes in bidding produce effects on search results whose specific nature and timing are predictable and consistent.
• Speed to Market. Sponsored Search Marketing offers effectively low to almost no latency across the Internet Marketing Cycle. Bid changes produce near-instantaneous effects on search results.
• Excellent controllability. Because of its high transparency, tight coupling, and very low latency, Sponsored Search Marketing renders the Internet Marketing Cycle almost perfectly controllable. Achievable results are constrained by the dynamics of the marketplace, but not by those of the Search Marketing Cycle.
• Limited operational loss. A consequence of the excellent controllability of Sponsored Search Marketing is that—unlike Organic Search Marketing—it is possible to reduce the possibility of a negative operational ROI nearly to zero. The cost associated with this benefit is that even very successful Sponsored Search campaigns produce significantly lower margins than their Organic Search counterparts.
• Responsiveness. Because dynamically generated keywords directly reflect the underlying concerns of your clients, changes in the marketplace will produce corresponding shifts in the nature of traffic driven to the website, whether or not marketplace changes are detected by your firm's management!
• Opt-out immunity. Unlike e-mail campaigns, search engine users cannot deliberately refrain from receiving your message when it is delivered next to a search result.
• Blacklist immunity. Unlike Organic Search Marketing campaigns, Sponsored Search Marketing carries no real possibility of blacklisting.
• Cumulative effect. Each additional keyword listed contributes to your firm's footprint in search engine indices. Meanwhile, automated bid management enables continued support even of commoditized keywords, producing an aggregate residual return well into the future.
• High granularity. Unlike Organic Search Marketing, Sponsored Search Marketing can segment a market nearly without limit.
• Some channel bias control. Sponsored Search Marketing campaigns can exert complete and direct control over geographic bias, typically down to a metro-area level. To a lesser degree, some sponsored search providers also permit control over other demographic biases.
• Zero operational impact. When managed by a third party like Profit Rank, an effective Sponsored Search Marketing campaign requires no interference with your firm's operational cycle.
• The “Long Tail” effect. Because effective Sponsored Search Marketing campaigns derive their keywords from concurrently-run Organic Search Marketing campaigns, Sponsored Search enjoys a similar Long-Tail effect, for the same reasons.
• Cross-Channel Impact. Many assets of a Sponsored Search Marketing campaign, including landing pages and creatives, can be used effectively to support related Affiliate Marketing campaigns.

There are also a few risks and limitations associated with Sponsored Search Marketing. They are:

• Click Fraud. Unlike Organic Search Marketing campaigns, Sponsored Search Marketing efforts are vulnerable to click fraud. Profit Rank has teamed with click fraud software vendors and can provide click fraud prevention limiting your risk. 
• No persistent effect. Unlike Organic Search Marketing, Sponsored Search Marketing ceases to produce traffic immediately once bidding stops.