MarketingSherpa’s Search Engine Marketing Survey

Just released today, MarketingSherpa highlights the results of their 2004 Search Marketing Survey of 3007 search engine marketers. Some interesting findings

Most people thought each of the different methods of search marketing to be “somewhat effective”

	Very Good	Somewhat	Not Good	BAD
Optimization	31%	50%	14%	5%
Paid Ads	34%	47%	12%	6%
Paid Inclusion	18%	51%	23%	8%

The average marketer using search reported that they were spending 15% of their total budget (that’s online plus offline) on SEM for 2004.

Cost Per Click

Business-to-business marketers were paying the most per click – averaging $1.69 for product marketing and $1.75 for service marketers.

On average, respondents report that after using search engine optimization techniques, site traffic from organic clicks increased an average of 73% in the six months after optimization.

So, b-to-b marketers seeking lead generation wound up with 7.6% conversions from paid search versus 6.7% conversions from organic clicks. On the other hand, b-to-c ecommerce sites with an average sale of $51-100 converted 4.8% of paid search clicks to buyers versus 6.5% of organic clicks.

Landing Pages

While studies repeatedly show specialized landing pages *without* regular site navigation get the highest conversion rates, the trend these days are as follows:

Marketers using specialized landing pages: 42%

Marketers using deeplinking: 32%

Marketers sending to a home page: 26%

Agencies vs In House

While 76% using SEO did it in-house and 66% using paid search ads did it in-house, those that do use agencies got better results:

Agencies get significantly higher average click rates (3.4% versus 2.8%) and higher conversion rates for paid search (6.8% versus 5.4%). When it comes to organic, agencies get slightly lower conversion rates (6.1% versus 5.8%) which makes sense because they control link depth but not site design.

» Read Article: Special Report: 3,007 Marketers Reveal Search Marketing Costs, Clicks, & Conversion Results

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