The Google AdWords platform completed 10 years last month, and during this period it has helped over a million small and medium enterprises globally to leverage the power of search engine advertising. Sridhar Seshadri, head of online sales at Google India, describes the company’s strategy in an e-mail interaction with Business Standard. Edited excerpts:
How many SMEs has Google reached out to and converted into customers in India?
There are about 35 million SMEs in India, of which about 1 million have an online presence. In the last two years, we have focused our efforts in reaching out to businesses that already have an online presence. With our first call centre in Delhi, which we started in December last year, we were able to reach out to 1,000 customers per day. We have seen a tremendous response to that and our customer base for AdWords has doubled in the last one year in India.
We recently announced an additional facility in Hyderabad and we have also introduced local language support, which means we will now be able to reach out to customers in six languages, including English. The new languages that we have included are Telugu, Tamil, Kannada and Malayalam. We expect to increase our daily outreach capacity to 2,500 customers per day in 2011.
We also did a pilot with seven agencies in 20 different cities in the country and backed by the response for that, we have now introduced a new programme called Google Engage. Google Engage is designed to educate and support those businesses that specialise in helping other businesses succeed online. Typical agents include interactive agencies, individual webmasters, web developers, and IT consultants.
How did you sell SMEs the idea of adopting technology to scale up?
We’re focused on helping businesses of all sizes, and SMEs are a big part of that. When we first launched AdWords, we made sure that it was self-service and available online, so that anyone could sign up. There are no minimum budgets and businesses can literally start on just a few hundred rupees a day.
Our self-service model saw instant adoption from the technically savvy Indian businesses, but most Indian SMBs need some handholding to get them started and we have seen great traction with some initiatives in that direction. Our jump start service in India helped a lot in ensuring that SMEs of all sizes understood the model well and we worked with them and guided them on how to manage their campaign online for a month free of cost.
What insights have you gained in helping SMBs to adopt search engine advertising?
First, ads should be useful and relevant, not annoying or intrusive. Second, because AdWords is self-service, anyone can start advertising online from their living room. And because there’s no minimum spend, it works for businesses with any budget.
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Third, auctions can price thousands of ads better than humans can. Advertisers bid on keywords, but instead of bidding on the price per impression, they bid on the price they’re willing to pay each time a user clicks on their ad. The auction runs every time an ad is served, and winners are determined algorithmically in a fraction of a second.
Fourth, give users a voice in the ads. Price shouldn’t be the only factor in the auction. Instead, the auction should also include a measure of the ad’s relevance to the search query, which Google calls the quality score.
Finally, data strips the guesswork from your business. One of the unexpected benefits of running the world’s biggest, fastest auction is that it produces an enormous amount of data that can be analysed, crunched, and translated into real insights about your business. This data is an opportunity for Google and its AdWords customers to understand their customers and identify new opportunities. Today, we provide advertisers a number of tools to crunch all this data.
Search ads are still the best way to reach potential customers when they’re raising their hand to express interest in products and services. Search ads continue to be extremely cost-effective for businesses, since advertisers only pay for high-quality leads.
What goals and targets have you set for the next one year in India?
We continue to be excited about the future of search ads and introducing new ad formats that make advertising even more relevant for users. We will continue to scale our outreach efforts through the call centre and the Google Engage programme. India is already the second fastest growing market after Russia for Google AdWords and we’re confident of maintaining our momentum as we move into 2011.