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: Shailesh Rao, managing director, Google India, is pleased that Indian companies have begun to include digital in their marketing mix, but is not happy with the pace at which this “extremely flexible tool” is being adopted here. With a wide range of offerings Google, Rao believes, is poised to provide clutter breaking marketing opportunities to Indian companies, provided they are willing to come out of their skepticism. He believes digital advertising in India, projected at Rs 420 crore in 2008, will grow to a whopping Rs 1,100 crore by 2011. He can be bullish on this score as over 48% of Google’s revenues come from non-US markets, including India. Rao spoke to FE’s Radhika Sachdev about Google’s plans for the Indian market.
Can you share your estimates on the online advertising spend in India?
The total online advertising market in India is projected at Rs 420 crore in 2008, according to FICCI-PricewaterhouseCoopers. Within that, we see a great deal of diversity, depending on the principal objective behind a campaign—whether it is lead generation, customer acquisition or direct marketing. Online, is the most cost-effective means of executing a direct marketing strategy.
To my mind, advertising has always been a science by proxy. A 30-second television campaign for instance, always gives incremental gains but the beauty of the online medium is that its results are more cumulative and somewhat quantifiable. Thanks to the interactive nature of the digital medium, it’s a child’s play for a marketer to generate rich data for analysis, limited not just to the volume of traffic arriving to a site, analysing conversions etc, but also assisting in improving campaigns and their profitability.
Is there a way to measure the RoI (return on investment) from a digital campaign that would convince brands to commit more resources to the medium?
Of course, there is, and it’s more democratic and flexible a system than is possible with the conventional media. Let me explain that with the mechanics of Google’s
Adword programme. There is no rate card or ad inventory for our clients. Depending on what each customer is worth to the advertiser, the latter makes a cost per click (CPC) bid for an ‘opt in’. The bid would vary with the economics of the business, so the click-through rate (CTR) for a florist would be different from that for a jeweler (depending on the impressions served). This means they can set their bids...
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