Getting Hits - Big League Style

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On March 2, 2004 Yahoo! introduced the “CONTENT ACQUISITION PROGRAM.” Overture launched a new paid inclusion program, called Site Match, as the commercial component of CAP. Tell us briefly what this meant for your company and your involvement in the program. What opportunities did this provide ineedhits.com…short term and long term?

Ineedhits.com was extremely pleased to be chosen as one of only six launch partners for Overture Site Match. As both a previous Inktomi and AltaVista partner, OSM was a natural extension to the existing services that we had on offer. We also got to provide input and feedback on the program, based on our considerable experience in dealing with customers. This feedback is still continuing to ensure that the program meets the needs of our customers – something that is very important to ineedhits.com.

In the short term, OSM proved to be an engineering challenge – getting a PFI system up and running isn’t as simple as it sounds. The timeline to get OSM out was aggressive in response to market conditions. The IT team lead by our CTO Deb Blecha did a great job getting the system ready on launch date which allowed us to be the first reseller with their site live. This meant we are able to take advantage of all the launch publicity and allow our existing customer base to participate from day one. It proved to Overture our ability to deliver a program that was within spec and on time.

Longer term, the opportunities that exist for ineedhits.com are endless. Being an Overture partner opens up many opportunities, as we expand our offerings to include more Overture services.

How can your customers benefit from this significant relationship?

OSM, as a program, provides a far greater reach than any other paid inclusion program. With OSM customers now have the ability to guarantee their place in the index for the technology servicing a large number of portals and search destinations on the web. Furthermore, using the Geo- targeting feature that is available, will be able to target customers in specific countries or regions.

Existing customers in our legacy Inktomi or AltaVista will also be able to transition seamlessly into OSM. We have also developed a promotion that will see renewing and migrating customers obtaining a discount on the upfront quality review fee – a loyalty bonus for being an existing ineedhits.com customer.

While on the subject of customers, generally speaking, who is your typical client and what services are sought most frequently?

Traditionally our typical customer has been in the Small Office Home Office (SOHO) market place but with the greater acceptance of Paid Inclusion we are definitely seeing more and more Small to Medium Enterprises. However, this has not removed our core focus of servicing the needs of the “Moms and Pops” segment of the market.

Some of our readers might not be familiar with the company. Tell us a little about yourself and if there are advantages/disadvantages to being based in Australia?

Ineedhits.com started in 1996 as a submission company, when the founder Clay Cook recognized a need for webmasters to drive traffic to their website, in an efficient manner. Clay provided webmasters with a low cost way to sign up to many search engines – submission services. The logical extension was to bring on Search Engine Optimization services, with Paid Inclusion following in 2000.

Like any good internet business, we did start out in a garage! In 2004, ineedhits.com has just under 50 employees, split across 3 office locations. For the third time in our history, we have outgrown our current offices and are looking for a new location that will grow with the business.

Our growth since 1996 has been fueled by investing the profits of the company back into the company in terms of employees and systems. We have never received any Venture Capital funding, are 100% privately owned and cash flow positive. A great position to be in, especially post the dot com bust.

Many people are genuinely surprised that we are an Australian company. Being based in Australia is leads to both major advantages and challenges. Perth – where ineedhits.com is located – is regarded as the most isolated city in the world, yet there are a number of globally successful internet companies located here. We take advantage of the low costs of being in Perth (office costs, staff, etc) and our employees enjoy a quality lifestyle. With Perth having 4 universities, we have a good supply of quality employees to staff the business.

Until recently we enjoyed the benefit of the weaker Australian dollar, which allowed us to be extremely cost competitive against our overseas competitors. Now with a stronger dollar, we are still cost competitive due to the economies of scale and efficiencies we have built into the business.

The disadvantage of being in Perth is the time differences and the travel costs. Despite being in Perth, ineedhits.com runs a 24 x 5 customer service line, which we believe, is the longest in the industry. We have representatives at all of the major search engine conferences and advertising events, which is extremely time consuming – over 24 hours in the air to get from Perth to New York. This is simply a cost of doing business that we accept. As a result, we ensure that when we do attend the conferences, we do as much as we can – meeting end users, our partners and learning about this every changing industry.

Ineedhits is a quickly growing company…you’ve won awards for this. So, too, is the search marketing industry. How do you keep up to the trends, or more importantly stay ahead?

Being a partner and in regular contact with the major search engines helps to ensure we know what the trends are. Attending the various conferences helps to keep up with the industry but so many things can change in between conferences.

So just like everyone else, we monitor the press releases and various bulletin boards to ensure we know what is going on. Then on a quarterly basis, the Senior Management team of ineedhits.com get together to make sure we are still on track with our 12 month plans and visions – which is about as far forward as we can look in this industry which is changing so rapidly.

In the midst of all this rapid change, we take an extremely methodical approach to developing a new product or service. We follow world’s best practice in developing our systems to make sure they are scalable, modular and flexible enough to react to the changing needs of the market.

Analysts predict a rosy future for search marketing including paid search. Jupiter’s figure, I believe, is $14.8 billion by 2008. This must make you sleep better at night, right? Why such explosive growth in this field? By your own customer demand and industry development experience, do you think this is sustainable?

Yes, we do believe that over the next few years, this growth is sustainable. It is our firm belief that Search Engine Marketing is in the transition stage from Early Adopter to Early Majority in the market lifecycle. The general acceptance and awareness by marketers (both big and small) is what is driving this huge growth. It is only natural, that at some point the year on year growth will slow but the industry will be worth a considerable amount of money by then – many, many billions of dollars.

Even at the figures quoted, SEM will only be a part of the overall marketing spend (traditional media) by marketers. The real advantage of SEM over traditional marketing spend is that everything is trackable and the ROI can be easily calculated. That is where the challenge will be – educating and challenging the thinking of traditional marketing professionals and agencies to accept this highly quantifiable form of marketing.

A challenge that ineedhits.com is very much looking forward to, because this is what will fuel the continued growth.

The search industry is very competitive globally. Differentiating yourself in light of this is not only critical but essential for survival. How successful has ineedhits been in this regard and what things do you have to do to remain ahead of the pack?

Our core market is an extremely tough market to attract and maintain customers. The SOHO market requires extremely high volumes of customers, scalable systems and processes that provide efficiencies of scale to service this low average revenue per client sector. That has always been the market segment that we have aggressively targeted and tailor our systems, products and marketing towards. Because of this, we have developed a strong understanding of what our customers want and this is what we provide to them.

Ineedhits has formulated several important partnerships such as Overture and Ask Jeeves. What specifically were these companies looking for in a partnership? What qualities/measures must you maintain to keep these relationships healthy?

We believe that what makes ineedhits.com attractive to partnership offers is our proven ability to manage programs and deliver them to our core market segment. We have a fundamental understanding of what this group of customers want and we know how to deliver it to them. Combine this with our large IT team, proven development methodology and customer service department we are able to handle all facets of taking a program from conception to market.

What do you guys have against fancy websites? Are you in favour of substance over style?

Our website has specific business goals that are inline with what we are trying to achieve in core market segment. We measure and track the important aspects of website to ensure that it is meeting – and hopefully exceeding – those goals. Whilst a fancy website may look good, it is the functionality and information that it provides will ultimately determine its success.

With that in mind, we are going through a careful process of evaluating our current website, with the intent of providing a fresh look and feel in the very near future. We want to ensure that any changes we do make to our website will benefit the customer who we serve and further increase the value we provide to them.