Air France Case Brief
Executive Summary
Rob Griffin, the senior vice president and U.S. director of search for Media contacts, a media consulting firm, is faced with the task of optimizing search engine marketing (SEM) for Air France as the company seeks to compete in the hyper-competitive U.S. market. Even though Griffin is satisfied with the performance of his company, he wants to make the team to remain the leading position and provide the results that Air France wanted. At the time of the case, SEM has become an advertising phenomenon, with North American advertisers spent $ 9.4 billion in the SEM channel, up to 62% in 2005. In the past, Media contacts h had concentrated on Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo for the search engine
Likewise, “Lyon” in MSN-Global and “Athens” in Yahoo-US also generates a negative ROA. Conversely, “Florence” in Yahoo-US has 18691.44% ROA and “Lyon” in Google-Global generates 748.53% ROA. In addition, based on the data of Kayak, it appears that this metasearch site has both a lower Cost Per Click and a much higher Transaction Conversion Rate than the average publisher. With these factors it appears to be a superior option for advertising. From the Pivot table, we can see that each publisher has distinct advantages. Thus, it is important to examine the data set and find out the most effective ad campaign.

Strategic Options
There are two options that Media Contacts team may consider to improve SEM campaigns of Air France. The first option is a uniform strategy across all the search engine publishers. As the case mentioned, unbranded keywords produce a larger percentage of single-click conversions. The company can continue working with publishers by biding the campaigns from all the search engine publishers. This option requires no additional cost and ensures the team to provide a proposal in the upcoming biannual financial planning session. The second option is to adopt a customized approach for each search engine publisher. This approach requires an in-depth analysis of the data and find out the most effective campaign. My recommendation is the second option based on my examination of data from