Pay for Performance should go beyond Leads and Clicks: Pinstorm-IAMAI Roundtable
15 January, 2009
Lintas Media Group and Pinstorm along with Internet and Mobile Association of India hosted a roundtable on ‘Marketing through the recession: Is pay-for-performance advertising the silver bullet?’ in Mumbai on January 13, 2009.
The open-format discussion was led by Lynn de Souza, chairperson and CEO, Lintas Media; Pradeep Shrivastava, CMO, Idea Cellular; Rajiv Prabhakar, vice president, retail business, ShareKhan; Aekta Shyam, general manager, online marketing and technology, Taj Group; and Debadutta Upadhyaya, national sales head, Yahoo India. The session was moderated by Mahesh Murthy, founder and CEO, Pinstorm.
“These are tough and nervous times. We are not sure for how long it (the recession) will last and whether it will improve or get worse,” said Pradeep Shrivastava of Idea Cellular. “We need to be prudent and extra careful. The digital advertising medium is measurable and allows you to reach out to a very focused audience, especially when the times are tough and the competition is forcing you to be more aggressive.” He went on to add that “for the last one year, Idea has been spending on digital and it has seen encouraging results.”
Rajiv Prabhakar of ShareKhan said, “We have been working with small budgets. We have very clearly earmarked budgets for our pay for performance and it is delivering results.” Prabhakar also revealed that it was indeed internet that built brand ShareKhan.
Debadutta Upadhyaya of Yahoo India suggested that the definition of pay for performance should be broadened up. According to him, it should go beyond just leads and clicks. Upadhyaya also felt that some companies, despite having leads generated, are ill-equipped to respond or deliver. Some of the marketers want leads on their websites without having any interesting content on them, he said.
“We primarily focused on print and television till 2000. However, over a period of time, internet has become a significant revenue generator for us,” Aekta Shyam of Taj Group said. “We are also planning to go mobile soon. We follow our customers wherever they go and if they are on social networking sites, we would like to be there with them.”
Lynn de Souza of Lintas Media pointed out, “The big spenders in digital have always been financial services and travel. And these are the ones that have been hit the most by the recession. Fortunately for them, the digital advertising medium is doing very well. They will not be able to afford to be on TV, with no positive return, and therefore, they will not pull back on digital, since the medium is growing; they will continue their ad spends.”
Mahesh Murthy, while making his concluding remark, said, “Digital is a measurable medium and is becoming a mass medium. I think the advertisers, more than being educated about the medium, know what they want as results. They have a huge need for accountability. I think the medium can go to them and say this is how we are accountable. If the media doesn’t offer accountability, the advertisers will not stand it.”
Yes you are right it must go beyond leads and clicks.....
PPS is another performing action these days
There is no doubt that Digital marketing especially online marketing has grown leaps and bounds. The advertiser too are getting more and more aware of the potential of leveraging the power of Internet. But I strongly feel that it is very important to have informative and engaging content on your website because the marketing techniques can only bring visitors to your site. If your website isn't good enough those visitors would never convert in customers.
The reason to adopt Pay for Performance as their primary strategy to increase sales is that they can measure every aspect of the marketing campaign. Starting from selecting the niche to delivering the services, they can monitoring and make changes in the campaign as required. They can focus on cost and ROI simultaneously.
Dear Lalit,
There are no parameters for Pay for Performance (PfP). It depends whether you want others to do PfP or you want to do it for others. It very surprising in India that everyone talks about this. In fact, if we look at international markets, they are already doing these activities on full scale basis and they call it Affiliate Marketing.
I happened to see a post yesterday about Jet Airways who recently launched their affiliate program through some network. It is great to see that Indian Aviation Industry has now seen and realised that they should adopt the international standards of PfP. Here they are giving and allowing any website to give them traffic based on performance, hence, to your parameters, I think, from a merchant point of view, you need to enable your partners with such a facility wherein they can access your products with a third party tracking tool.
I also went through Google and I happened to visit many affiliate websites. Look at some of the websites like - makemytrip-deals.com, cleartrip-offers, http://www.jetflights.in, http://www.mumbaidelhiflights.com, http://www.delhimumbaiflights.com - all seem to be giving good traffic to respective merchants. Thanks to all these travel OTAs and players who are doing these activities.
I am sure in time to come, India should grow a lot.
Ashok
SEO Professional
Can someone suggest me what are the parameter of Pay per Perfomance.
I am agree with the view that Pay for Performance must be beyond Clicks, Leads or Sale. Internet Marketing is a new medium for Indian Advertisers as compared to other parts of India.
Even though the penetration of India is rising year on year, it is only 2.9% of total population as per one statistics from eMarketer.
Businesses in India are taking this medium more seriously as compared to few years back but still with the tight budget to spend. When the budget is tight then it requires to place little bit extra on performance and that is the reason that Pay for Performance is becoming more popular.
The reason to adopt Pay for Performance as their primary strategy to increase sales is that they can measure every aspect of the marketing campaign. Starting from selecting the niche to delivering the services, they can monitoring and make changes in the campaign as required. They can focus on cost and ROI simultaneously.
Pay on Performance also can be useful in creating and enhancing brand awareness about the product and companies. There are many examples where this medium was utilized effectively.
Yogendra Oza
http://yogendraoza.blogspot.com
Very Nice Comments.
I have been watching ShareKhan Since long time. They were first to start it. Good Website Catchy Colors. Great Work
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