Emerging economy, Booming Online Advertising

The emerging economy of India has created a new market which barely existed – Internet Advertising. A technical research was conducted on Search Engine Marketing by IAMAI and PinStorm – The Search Engine Marketing Firm, the first of its kind anywhere in the world. The report “estimates” the market size, advertisers, cost per click with respect to different verticals(Automative, Banking and Finance, etc). Since Google(probably the largest advertising platform available for India) and its advertisers are secretive about the financial figures, the authors of the report state that these are “estimates” and are approximately correct after 100s of spreadsheets were verified by various industry leaders who approved PinStorm’s findings. Credit should goto Dr. V Vinay, the Technical Architect for this research project and Mahesh Murthy, the think outside the Box Venture Capitalist from Mumbai.

Note that, Advertisers and Internet users located in India and global Advertisers targetting Indians were the core subjects of this research.
Excerpts from the report:

• Indians query 1 Billion searches every month of which 308 Million results have sponsored links on the results page. Over 4.8 Million clicks are estimated on the sponsored links, resulting in a Page CTR of 1.55%.
• Their are over 40,000 advertisers globally including India who collectively spend $52 Million annually. Indian advertisers had an annual budget of $16 Million.
• Average cost per click paid by advertiser in India is $0.36 with $5.92 being the highest.

It’s now time to know about the Toppers:

The top 5 search buyers vertically – General Online, Retail e-commerce, Travel, Made for AdSense and Banking and Financial services. Top advertisers are Naukri + 99Acres + JeevanSathi. eBay and its affiliates. Monster & Jobs Ahead. Google for its own publicity.

Banking & Financial Services: Citigroup Inc leads HSBC by 2.5 times in ad spending. ICICI paid highest, CPC $0.89

Travel: Yahoo! Travel marginally lead over Lufthansa on the ads spending chart. Holiday Inn paid the highest CPC, $1.12

Jobs: Naukri is the top advertiser while Accenture Ltd’s jobs paid the highest CPC, $0.75

Technology: Hewlett-Packard Company lead Dell Inc by double the advertising spending. Intel Corporation paid the highest CPC, $0.66

Retail: eBay is the largest advertiser contributing 90% spending in this vertical while FutureBazaar of Pantaloon Retail India Limited paid the highest CPC of $0.6

Matrimonial and Dating: Shaadi.Com is the highest spender followed by JeevanSathi and Fropper.

General Online: Google Inc leads the pack followed by Sulekha and Yahoo Inc

Should you need any further clarifications, feel free to drop me a line. Personally I feel, PinStorm is the first Indian company to unleash the power of computing for online Advertising and Marketing. I am raising my expectations from Mr. Murthy and his team. Let’s rant in a separate post on the modelling of this research project as this is the first of its kind in the world.

India Online Advertising , Internet India , Search Marketing , India Marketing