As per this survey conducted, measuring the ROI is the major challenge that marketers will face in all the three key search plan of actions in marketing and advertising industry i.e. paid search, search engine optimization and social media marketing. It is also highlighted that most of the companies (more than 95%) advertise on Google; out of which nearly 70% are paying Google for advertising, and around 50% are broadcasting their advertisements via Google grid. In contrast to Google, usage of Yahoo network is just 50% and merely 45% for Microsoft's Bing in 2009.
With time, marketers have seen keyword inflation on Google; also Google keywords are getting expensive each day when compared to last year.
Impact of advancement in Social Media
Today, social media is being given attention by most of the companies but the budgets these companies set for social media marketing are still seen insignificant when compared with SEO and paid search campaigns. But the expansion interests as mentioned on budget for social media is projected to increase this year. More than 50% of the companies are planning to have increase in budgets in the year 2010. In spite of this insignificant budget plans on social media, more than 60% of the companies promote their brand on renowned social networks like Facebook and Twitter.
Along with the advancement in Social Media Marketing, there is little positive impact on paid search campaigns which was just 70% in 2007, increased to 78% in 2009 and to nearly 80% as of now. But the participation in Search Engine Optimization is stable since 2007 i.e. 90%.
The tendency for in-house SEM has increased when compared with last year. Whereas for SEO it has diminished very minutely (nearly negligible) but for paid search, there is spectacular decrease of around 10%; from 86% last year to 76% this year.
As per the projections made out of survey, companies are expected to increase their budgets for SEO and paid search in 2010. Nearly 50% are divvying up budgets into SEM, propelling their expense on print advertising. Some of them are moving spends from direct mail and significant moves are seen from conferences and web based advertising.
This is as per the survey conducted by the professional organization working for Search Engine Marketing industry, which is widely known as SEMPO. The estimated spend for 2010 is $16.6 billion growing to $18.6 billion by 2011 according to the projections.
