Marketers publish search marketing costs, clicks and conversion rates

This morning, Marketing Sherpa has published the results of their 2nd Annual Search Marketing Survey. The survey had over 3,271 marketers participate and Marketing Sherpa is claiming it to be the largest Search Engine Marketing study ever.

 

The survey includes ;

·         New stats on clicks, costs, conversions (and fraud)

·         Which Search Engine Marketing tests work and which don't

·         Differences between agency-side vs in-house Search Engine Marketing results (Should you hire an agency or do it yourself?)

·         Details on how much marketers are budgeting for Search Engine Marketing for 2006.

Summary of the Results

Search Engine Optimisation came out far ahead of non-search tactics such as email marketing (25% "very effective" rate) and affiliate marketing (22% "very effective" rate).

Marketers mentioned that for 2006 56% of total budget for B2C products and 40% of total budget for B2B products and services. While this is fairly normal for B2B marketers; the B2C data is skewed by our high readership of marketers in ecommerce/multichannel retail, travel/hospitality, and financial services.

Average number of keywords surveyed marketers said they were conducting Pay per click campaigns per month:

Sept 2004 keywords   9,100
March 2005 keywords 14,700
Sept 2005 keywords   17,314

Statistics on clicks, costs, conversions ... and fraud

Pay Per Click Clickthrough Rate        2.6%
Google Cost per Click                        $1.61
Conversion PPC                                  3.6%
Conversion SEO                                 4.2%

What's not working?

14% of marketers said local search ads "work but are not worth the effort."

How do search agencies and consultancies differ from in-house search marketers?

For SEO campaigns, agencies claimed to be performing vastly better than marketers relying on in-house optimization were. We might not trust this data if it were not for the fact that hundreds of agencies and thousands of house marketers participated in this survey, making results fairly statistically significant.

Plus, everyone started at roughly the same level.... agencies said their clients' site traffic prior to SEO was about 74,000 monthly visitors. In-house marketers said their pre-SEO traffic was about 71,000 visitors per month.

However overall site traffic lift six months after optimization was:

Agency optimized    110% increase
In-house optimized   38% increase

To learn more about SEO / Search Engine Optimisation contact Wiliam