Meltwater Reach Search Engine Marketing and Ad Campaign Measurement Software

Search engine marketing (SEM) is a growing business that enables organizations to closely target their ideal customer base and track where sales leads originate. This type of marketing is much more efficient than traditional TV, radio and print ads or billboards, which require businesses to spend significant amounts of money to broadcast their message to a large audience. Many of these audience members may not be interested in their service, and the client has no way to track the success of any particular ad.

Currently, SEM can be a laborious and expensive process. In many instances, businesses have an individual working in-house who is responsible for bidding on keywords to "own," purchasing the ads and tracking the results. These individuals use tools like Google Ad Words to track their online marketing success, which can require significant time to evaluate results across a number of search engines. The other—much more expensive—alternative is to outsource to agencies, which charge a percentage of the advertising spend to deliver a report on results at the end of the month. The problem with this is two-fold. First, the more you spend on advertising, the more you have to pay the agency for this work. Second, there is no transparency into the reporting process, so it is difficult to tell how much time—and money—was being spent to optimize SEM campaigns.

A new combination of technology and consulting services from Meltwater Reach is changing the game. Now small and mid-sized businesses can effectively play in the same advertising market as their larger competitors.