At the Digital Marketing Round Table organized by the IAMAI and Pinstorm on Wednesday in Delhi, Hitesh Oberoi, COO of Info Edge spoke about how the companys advertising spends shifted online, and how they make marketing decisions. We were rather surprised when Oberoi mentioned the value of some of the marketing deals that they had inked - most interestingly, the one with Rediff which started them off on spending on marketing online. 2005-06: A Rs. 5 Crore Marketing Deal With Rediff Oberoi said that in 2005-06, they began spending almost half their marketing budget online. At that time, one of their competitors - JobsAhead, which was later acquired by Monster, had a head start in launching database access services. Print and TV had never really helped Info Edge get too many resumes, so they had to get aggressive on resume acquisition. "We did a Rs. 5 crore annual deal with Rediff, which took a long time to negotiate. We got around Rs. 2-2.20 per click - that works out to around 2.5 crore clicks a year. That was a lot more than the total Internet population in India at that time. When we did the deal with Rediff, suddenly our resumes went through the roof. The conversion rates were around 4%-5% of all traffic. It fundamentally changed the way we looked at advertising. Since then it has been at around 50% for the last three years, and it's only changed this year." No To Print, Yes To TV; Creative Matters…
