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Google, which has one million small and medium enterprise (SME) advertisers globally, expects to soon bring the same number of advertisers on its platforms in India. In 2013, Google’s total advertisement revenue stood at $50.58 billion against overall revenue of $55 billion.
“Globally, Google has a more than 1 million advertisers who are small and medium businesses. India is critical for Google in terms of the number of merchants and SMEs,” said Kodukulla Suryanarayana, head of small and medium business at Google India.
According to management consulting firm Zinnov there are around 47 million SMEs in India. However, just five per cent of them have an online presence. Identifying this as an opportunity, Google, in November 2011, launched an initiative called ‘India, get your business online’. The prime objective of the programme was to help SMEs establish an online presence by providing free domain names and tools.
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“In India, we believe 8-10 million (SMEs) is what we should look at. Even a million is a huge number,” Suryanarayana said.
So far, Google says it has helped around 300,000 small and medium businesses in India establish their websites with the help of its 1,200 certified partners for AdWords, the company’s proprietary advertising platform. Even though the company has not been able to monetise its premium products like AdWords, AdWords Express or Google Maps with SMEs, the signs of adoption are encouraging.
“The current plan is two-fold. We want to get more SMEs online. Secondly, they will eventually advertise and grow their business. The adoption of advertising has been fairly low. But it’s okay since we did not expect a lot of them to embrace it because the main objective was to give them the idea of having a website,” Suryanarayana added.
A few SMEs that went online early in life have started to see success. Bangalore-based luxury chocolate maker Zoroy Chocolate decided to launch a website even before opening a physical store. Today the company gets orders from remote parts of India and it supplies chocolates to 6,000 postal index number codes.
“The first step is to tell people what the Internet can do for them. Now that they are aware, we want to move them to a better platform. We want to see if we can give them a global reach through our AdWords and other platforms,” Suryanarayana said.
Google AdWords is an automated online advertising platform for businesses. AdWords Express is a simplified version of AdWords that automates the process to set up advertising.
For example, a restaurant whose customers are primarily local, he can set the radius accordingly and money he is going to offer. The system, with the set of key words, will automatically know that what a user is searching in this area and will send the restaurant the leads.
