‘India’s analytical talent helps search marketing a great deal’

BANGALORE, INDIA: At a time when renowned laptop manufacturer, Lenovo, was relying on Google and Bing for its search marketing, and left wondering if it was reaping enough returns on every $1 invested by it, there came in a specialized digital marketing firm to lend it a helping hand.

In 2012, the agency helped Lenovo grow its search advertising revenues grow by 87 per cent year-on-year as compared to 2011. “We started engaging with them, offered our services that were built around our core technology, which involves 27 different algorithms. It assured around 65-70 per cent sales for every click,” beams Udayan Bose, founder and chief executive officer of NetElixir, the firm behind Lenovo’s enhanced success rate.

NetElixir was founded by Bose in 2004, and is currently based out of Hyderabad (R&D) and Princeton NJ, with an office in London and workforce of 60 employees.

Bose explains that search advertising is different from traditional advertising and since he happened to head the marketing team during his earlier stint, he could dive in headlong into the nascent domain back then.

“We have an analytical, technology-driven approach towards search marketing. Since India has a lot of analytical and mathematical talent, our confidence paid off,” he continues.

As a matter of fact, India’s low E-commerce numbers mask the Internet’s huge impact on purchase decisions, concludes a new report by The Boston Consulting Group (BCG). According to it, 40 per cent of India’s 90 million urban Internet users say that online activities, such as product research and price comparison influence what they buy. This digital influence is expected to greatly accelerate over the next five years, the report adds.

Apparently, it is just not India that has shortage of search marketing experts; even North America and Europe are said to face similar issues. So, NetElixir has built LXR, a search marketing SAAS (software as a service) solution, targeting corporates and digital marketing firms looking for a solution.

As a search marketing executive requires tools to understand and analyze data to share with the CMO, LXR addresses all of this in an analytical manner as required by the brand, elaborates Bose. “We had to
convert mathematical models to technology prototypes for multi-channel, core analytics and optimization from one dashboard – which also helps manage different social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and the rest.”

He also adds that the sophistication of search has increased over the past few years. “In the West, search query length has increased to 2.9 words from 2.1 during pre-recession days.

Sometime ago, NetElixir decided to focus more on SMBs and created a free tool called LXR MarketPlace, which, in Bose’s words, is to democratize search marketing and is their way to giving back to the community. “This market place was launched earlier this year shows growing acceptance with each passing month. Today, it has over 14,000 users – most being from Iran, followed by North America and Europe. India is currently at sixth position. It is an individual model to analyze Web pages and competition’s sites, among other data.”

“About 61 per cent of SMBs get no ROI from social media activities and find Facebook hardest to maintain. Social media is a subset of digital marketing, but SMBs are advertising on FB without any analysis and data,” Bose expounds on the primary reason behind them venturing into the domain.

As far as the Indian market is concerned, he divulges that they are setting up their operations and are planning to announce to brand marketers about their arrival.