Do you want to set up online advertisements that appear only to people searching in a particular city, region, or country? Do you want your advertisements to target the age group of 25-45? If you have specific requirements like these, Google's AdWords engine might be able to help. Three-year old startup bankbazaar.com is one of the many companies who have capitalised on what AdWords offers successfully.

To demonstrate, log on to www.google.co.in and search for a for car loan. A number of web site suggestions will pop up. In the list of suggestions, a few sites will be highlighted at the top of the page – these sites pay Google to make sure their advertisements called ‘AdWords' appear when somebody searches for a product or service they offer.

Fuelling growth

The AdWords engine is a great advertisement medium for small companies to reach out to target buyers in the age group between 30-45 years when compared to radio, television or print, says Adhil Shetty, founder and chief operating officer of bankbazaar.com .

“We started at Rs 5 crore in monthly disbursals and now we are disbursing over Rs 150 crore a month. This growth is primarily through AdWords. Starting with a modest advertising budget, the company now spends over Rs 25 lakh a month on Google. At this rate, we may even touch Rs 1 crore in a few months,” he said. Bankbazaar.com is an online marketplace for financial service products like loans and insurance products.

Unlike any other advertisement medium, AdWords provides a dashboard on the personal computer to monitor how many people have visited a website. “We can track the performance in real time. It is impossible in other mediums. Google also provides fraud detection to make sure only genuine visitors come to us,” he said.

Bankbazaar.com has now dedicated 90 per cent of its advertising budget to the online medium with the target group being the urban and net savvy consumer. It provides consumers instant customised rate quotes on loans and insurance products. Customers can instantly search for, compare and apply for loans, credit cards and insurance products on its web site.

AdWords is a performance-based advertising programme that enables large and small businesses to advertise on Google and its network of partner web sites. Thousands of businesses worldwide use AdWords for text, image and video advertisements priced at a cost-per-click and cost-per-impression basis.

Built on an auction-based system, AdWords is a highly quantifiable and cost-effective way to reach potential customers. Shetty too agrees that AdWords is cheaper than other mediums like television, radio or print for small companies like his.

In the beginning, bankbazaar.com set up an AdWords account and started out using very basic keywords that related directly to their products. These keywords were periodically analysed and helped identify ineffective keywords that could then be removed from the list, said Shetty, who has earlier worked with Deloitte Consulting in the US.

‘Ad'wise

Shetty advises new AdWords advertisers to keep their campaigns and keywords simple and relevant to their businesses. Also, he strongly believes that continuous analysis and refinement of the account is important to track the company's return on investment. “Focus on a consumer end-to-end experience that wows the customer,” he adds.

Nitin Bawankule, Director, Online Sales for Google India, says that the Ad Words customer base in India has doubled in the last one year. “India is the fastest growing market after Russia in terms of AdWords adoption by small and medium size businesses. We are very pleased with the growth we have seen in India. The opportunity here is huge,” he said, though he did not share any numbers.

India is a strategic market for Google in the Asia-Pacific region. With over 121 million internet users, India is already the third-largest internet market in the world with huge headroom for growth.

raja@thehindu.co.in

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