Research Paper (undergraduate) from the year 2018 in the subject Business economics - Offline Marketing and Online Marketing, grade: 1,7, University of Mannheim, language: English, abstract: Founders of online businesses often encounter the question of which digital marketing channel to invest in at an early stage. This report gives insights into the practical steps of setting the foundation of a digital marketing strategy. Furthermore, it will test the effectiveness of search engine marketing, a popular digital marketing channel consisting of search engine optimization and search engine advertising. It will be evaluated whether search engine optimization and search engine advertising are an adequate marketing strategy for traffic growth of My German Finances. The goal of developing a digital marketing strategy is to find an impactful and cost-efficient way to grow the audience of the website. For this purpose, the report focuses on the two elements of search engine marketing, namely search engine optimization and search engine advertising. Both fields are very complex and take a lot of effort to set up. Many on- and off-page adjustments need to be made for a noticeable effect on traffic and revenue. For search engine advertising, multiple factors need to be taken into account, such as website relevance and ad quality, in order to be able to run a successful ad campaign.