Trumblog

MarketingSherpa’s fourth annual edition of its Search Marketing Benchmark Guide was released recently and it’s content has been slowly filtering out in posts from bloggers such as Search Engine Guide’s Manoj Jasra and Search Engine Watch’s Kevin Newcomb. Here are some key points

• The search marketing industry is still expanding rapidly – as much as 31% in the United States and 39% globally for 2007. This year-over-year growth will slow in time. Still, search budgets are increasing by double-digit percentages for many marketers
• Most of the budgets are expanding in anticipation of rising keyword prices, rather than a desire to increase reach, according to Stefan Tornquist, research director at MarketingSherpa. “The concerns over rising prices has been ongoing, but it’s reached a new high.”
• Rising PPC prices have also led many marketers to focus on improving conversion of their landing pages, to better capitalize on traffic they are paying to get from search engines. 35 percent of respondents say they plan to increase their search engine optimization (SEO) budget by at least 11 percent in 2008, while 43 percent of Big Spenders (25K+ per month) plan to do so.
• Despite its high marks for ROI, SEO also came in third for “hard to gauge” with 21 percent of respondents saying it was hard to measure its ROI. Paid search fared better in that category, with just 9 percent saying it was hard to gauge its ROI.
• An increasing number are looking to bring more of their search efforts in-house, though most are contracting out parts of their campaigns. Those looking for in-house help are not having an easy go of it, though.

So basically this means

1. Prices are rising.
2. Effectiveness is difficult to determine
3. You should optimize your campaign and website to get the most out of your budget
4. Doing this yourself is not easy

This validates the frustration that I have seen with some of my clients who are spending plenty of money on search engine marketing, but are unable to see the ROI. If you are running an ecommerce site conversion is easy to track, but for so many other business where the sales process is more complex analysis is less precise. And you cannot fault a client for asking “Sure a user visited the page that we wanted them to, but did they make a purchase decision based upon that? If that cannot be proved and I am not seeing increased sales then remind me why I am paying so much?”

Clearly as this medium becomes more mature the early blush of excitement is changing into the cooler headed review of our actions. The influx of late arrivals to search advertising continues to raise prices and if a recession is on its way then we must be prepared to justify our budgets. SEM may be recession-proof, but I’m not going to make that assumption. As search engine marketers we need to educate our clients on what can be accomplished and what can’t. We also need to be honest about goals, effectiveness and value. If we don’t then clients will be tempted, if not forced, to take this in house. Ultimately an educated client is a good client who’s engagement in the campaign makes optimization of their site, enhancement of their campaign and better results easier to accomplish.

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