Posted by Jan on 25 Jan 2008
With the recent power outages we’ve been experiencing here in SA, I felt it necessary to provide some info regarding its effects on South African search engine marketing companies.
Unless there’s a big team of staff members to keep busy and therefore lose money because of loss of productivity, there really isn’t much impact on the business compared to some other industries at all, especially from a client’s point of view. That is of course assuming that there’s minimal server downtime and that power is available for at least a couple of hours a day, which it has been. There is always the issue of websites not loading due to the servers being off and this can have a serious effect on businesses choosing to host their websites on SA servers. That being said, if the client is hosting with a professional enough company, they will hopefully by now have generators or ups systems in place to ensure the uptime of their clients’ websites.
Unfortunately as SEM’s, we’re not always in control over where our clients host their websites, but in general, if websites are hosted by professional local or overseas companies, the impact of power cuts on our ability to provide a service is minimal. This is largely due to the fact that search engines don’t stop showing ads because of power cuts in SA. Search campaigns don’t need constant monitoring by humans either. The downside to that is of course that if a website is affected and the campaign manager can’t access the internet, he or she can’t switch off the campaigns and it will inevitably cost someone some money…
To summarise: Your ads will continue showing, and if your website is up and running, it will continue to receive targeted traffic, whether the company responsible for managing the campaigns have power or not.
