The Future Of Search Marketing
This post was made Dec 05, 2008 by Carlos del Rio
credit: Thomas Hawk
Search is growing. There is no denying that. Last year, 2007, $19.9 billion was spent advertising online, according to cnet. SEMPO projects that $1.3 billion was spent on search optimization. It is expected that 2008 numbers will be approximately 20% higher.
SEOMoz recently lamented the large discrepancy in spend between pay per click (PPC) and organic search spend, organic makes up about 11% of search marking budgets.
Concluding that:
SEO drives 75%+ of all search traffic, yet garners less than 15% of marketing budgets for SEM campaigns. PPC receives less than 25% of all search traffic, yet earns 80%+ of SEM campaign budgets.
I think that confidence in the “trackability” of PPC is largely to blame for the discrepancy. Because people are well aware of the how to measure the return on investment for dollars that create immediate action people feel safe with pay per click. But most people aren’t actually measuring the results of their traffic.
According to the Marketing Sherpa 2009 Benchmark Guide 9 in 10 search marketers employ web-analytics to track search, and 53% use Google Analytics. And the biggest complaint is that it is difficult to measure the effectiveness of organic search spend.
In most situations I recommend that web traffic be approached with a pair of metrics. If you are currently running PPC and SEO initiatives I invite you to make three comparisons.
- New Visitors from PPC vs. New Visitors from Organic Search by Keyword
- PPC Spend VS Branded Searches
- Number of Visits it takes to make a conversion
This will help you tease out how much your PPC spending is affecting how your site is searched for.
Those statistics are good news for people like me. If my organic rankings keep strengthening, I’ll be able to dump my PPC activities altogether…