Web Marketing Strategy Update

MarketingSherpa has released their 2nd Annual Search Marketing Benchmark report. 3,271 search marketers provided real-life results data for the survey, making it the biggest SEM study respondent base ever.

The new report includes:

• New stats on clicks, costs, conversions (and fraud)
• Which SEM tests work and which don’t
• Differences between agency-side vs in-house SEM results (Should you hire an agency or do it yourself?)
• How much marketers are budgeting for SEM for 2006 (breaks out b-to-b vs b-to-c)

Some excerpts:

Only 34% of 3,007 active search marketers that MarketingSherpa surveyed in July 2004 said their PPC ad results were “very good.” 13 months later, 43% of 3,271 surveyed MarketingSherpa readers said PPC ad results were “very effective” — a nine-point jump.

Search optimization (SEO) campaign satisfaction didn’t fare nearly as well. Last year 31% of surveyed marketers said SEO results were very good. This year 33% say SEO is very effective. It’s a gain, but only two points.

Even then, SEO came out far ahead of non-search tactics such as email marketing (25% “very effective” rate) and affiliate marketing (22% “very effective” rate).