Search Engine Marketing Grows and Exceeds Expectations [7/1/2008]

According to the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization's (SEMPO) 2007 State of the Market survey, North American search engine marketing spending is projected to exceed $25.2 billion by 2011.

One of the hot niches of search marketing is paid search. Paid search is when an online marketer pays a fee to a search engine every time a user clicks through to their site from a listing presented by the search engine.

Market research giant Forrester Research reports that 90% of U.S. online retailers it had recently surveyed use paid search. This surpassed their use of other online marketing techniques like email campaigns and comparison shopping. Almost 70% of these retailers favored search engine optimization (SEO) endeavors, ranking SEO as the fifth most popular online marketing technique.

Online marketers are learning as the industry grows. According to Hitwise, an online measurement service, more consumers are starting to go to search engines to start their online shopping. This is as opposed to going straight to a retailer’s site. This proves what many Internet marketing experts tout – paid and natural search go hand in hand and are an integral part of succeeding online.

Among Internet Retailer’s top ranked 500 online retailers in 2007, almost three quarters (72%) received more traffic than in the previous year. Thirteen percent got a minimum of half of their traffic from search engines. This was up from 10% in 2006.

Now that it is a proven entity, paid search is becoming more and more competitive. This can make it more expensive for individual marketers striving to get a high position in paid search results.

In addition to expense, it’s getting more complicated to gain results from paid search. In the past, in essence all a retailer had to do was bid on popular keywords. As rates for popular keywords skyrocket, online marketers must put together a more complex strategy to mitigate expense and still achieve results. Otherwise, it can be easy to spend a lot of money and see very little results.

Because of these factors, new software has emerged to help online marketers better manage their online marketing efforts. Consider this: according to Forrester Research, the average U.S. online retailer manages a keyword database of about 32,000 terms. Some can even go into the hundreds of thousands.
Another aspect in the online marketing maze is retargeting, also referred to as remarketing. This is simply another way to categorize ads and present them to searchers. It can be via any number of variables, eg, demographics, past shopping habits, etc. Remarketing follows customers who leave a retailer’s site without buying, it continues to show them relevant ads in hopes of having them return. The end goal is always to reach qualified shoppers.
According to SEMPO, online marketers are very interest in remarketing. Forty percent of those surveyed who were not currently using this technique planned to implement in within the next 12 months.
Due in part to the rising cost of keywords in paid search, many online marketers are also showing more interest in SEO techniques for natural search.

For more insight visit Pay Per Click Services

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