According to the state of search marketing By Chris Sherman, Associate Editor of search engine watch January 9, 2006 "In a surprising finding, the SEMPO study found that the majority of search marketers (62%) said branding was the primary objective of search marketing campaigns. Nearly as many, however (60%), said that selling products was a key objective."

There was a large division between large and small companies. The smallest companies focused far more heavily on sales while the largest sought to increase their brand recognition via campaigns, and set sales as a secondary goal for their websites.

Despite these ideals, less than 24% track or measure branding impact. This is not meant to imply that analytics and measurement are not valued by these companies: fully 80% of respondents track traffic volume, 74% measure conversion rates, and 69% measure click through rates. The relatively small number of marketers that use branding impact as a portion of their marketing matrix indicates that there are still significant opportunities for site wide optimization. Companies that optimize their web sites will benefit from an increase in organic positioning by domain, company and product identifiers. This is reinforced by several studies recently that indicate online ad spending will continue to increase at rates equal to or above 30% annually. The eventual effect, one that today is only beginning to become evident, is a dramatically increasing cost of keyword bidding at search engines, and online portals.

In short, many of today advertisers and marketers still focus on the demonstrable Returns on Advertising, such as tracking a specific online ad's effectiveness in generating clicks and purchase. They have not fully embraced the arena of full site optimization. Marketers today are currently less concerned with the more in-depth marketing focused ideals of branding and correlating online with offline marketing activities like purchasing behavior, use of coupons, etc. The 24% today that are measuring branding impact are leading the forthcoming wave of a fully integrated, marketing approach emphasizing avenues both on and off line. Software companies like WebTrends are leading the field in developing tools to assist in correlating the various marketing avenues. See www.WebTrends.com for information on their marketing analytics tools.

For additional information on this report and the industry visit SEMPO website, and review the State of the Search Marketing Industry 2005.

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