We are in a day and age where digital marketing has proven to be as important as conventional marketing, even more in some cases.
There are thousands of digital marketing agencies and millions of digital marketers out there who strive to optimize their campaigns day in and day out to reach the maximum number of people while staying within the budget constraints defined by their clients.
Digital marketing is an imperfect science that needs continuous A-B testing to achieve optimized results. While it may seem to be easy, one really has to take a deep dive in order to yield favorable results, making sure that the money being put in by the clients is utilized effectively.
Here are the most common mistakes that people make while talking about digital marketing:
SEO and SEM are different
Source: http://www.globalizationpartners.com/imgs/services/seo/SEM-Chart.png
Well, technically SEO is a party of SEM. SEM stands for Search Engine Marketing, which literally means marketing on a search engine. Search engines have two kinds of listings – organic and paid. The organic rankings are the “free” rankings achieved by a good SEO campaign and paid ranking is achieved by a good paid search advertising campaign. Search Engine Optimization or SEO is that part of SEM that helps you rank organically.
Display ads are graphical
Source: http://www.looksmart.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/online-display-ads.jpg
From the name “display ads”, one may think that these are graphical ads that are displayed across the web on various websites. Well, that is not entirely true. Display ads is the term given to the ads that are served on the display network of the advertising service provider, be it Google Adwords or Bing ads. The ad itself can be a graphical ad or a simple text based ad.
SEM has 3 components – Search, Display and Re-marketing
This is a common mistake or confusion for online advertising rookies. Just because they use a single tool (Google Adwords for example) to achieve the three types of advertising above does not mean that they are all SEM. SEM is advertising on search engines and has two components as stated above. Display ads and re-marketing ads are display on the display network partners of the online advertising service provider. On search ad campaigns on Adwords are part of SEM.
These are just three of the many things that may confuse someone when they are talking about digital marketing. While they seem small, it is important to know what they really are.
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