In recent years, Search Engine Marketing and pay per Click have experienced rapid growth, and it is no surprise that more and more companies are focusing there efforts on Search Engine Marketing.
In the first quarter of 2006, utilities comparison website Uswitch.com attracted more customers from its paid and organic search programme than it had using the medium in the whole of 2005. Part of this can be attributed to price rises from gas and electricity suppliers but it is still a very impressive figure.
In 2005, total online ad spend grew by 65.6 per cent, with paid-for search increasing by 79 per cent to almost £770m, according to a recent survey by the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB). Search marketing now accounts for more than 56 per cent of total online ad spend, leaving classified and display trailing.
Why is this? One of the fundamental factors has been the use of tracking your results.
Analytics packages have become more sophisticated in recent months. Any visitor that clicks through to a website from a search engine can be tracked, hence natural and paid-for search results can be examined in the same statistics package. The theoretical ability to measure SEM has been around for a while, but in the past 12 months it’s become much more real because you’re able to be more canny about your spend.
Information about customers who arrive via search engines is measured in several ways. One of the simplest methods for brands that use both paid-for and natural search is ‘tagged’ URLs, which track where users arrived from and which keyword they used to get there. Marketers can deduce that the rest of the traffic to a site has arrived organically. Once on a site, both organic and paid-for search visitors can be tracked using web analytics packages, which measure, among other things, the amount of time and money spent on a transaction.
Search has many advantages over traditional direct channels. The ‘pull over push’ effect of advertising that customers have requested, coupled with low acquisition costs, are attractive factors and spend is increasing.Even though keyword costs are rising, the cost of acquiring a customer is relatively low. The IAB recently suggested SEM could be worth £2bn in the next 12 months, making the sector more lucrative than national press advertising.
Source: Brand Republic
Author: 4Ps Marketing London
Tags: SEM
