Omniture and MarketingSherpa have released a new report based on their interviews with more than three thousand Search Engine Marketing professionals and about 800 Affiliate Program managers. The report is called Search Marketing Research: 2006 SEM Issues & Trends. A free summary is available at the Ominture Web Site (email address required).

I’ve outlined some of the interesting items below.

Here they are:

1. Search Marketing spending grew 277% between 2004 and 2005 to $5.5 million.
2. The cost per click grew as well:
Google - 24.8%
Yahoo - 30%
Shopping Engines - 36.8%

I thought those statistics were interesting — are people buying more online, or just discovering sites like shopping.com? I also wondered if Chitika had any effect on the shopping engine numbers.

3. Keyword buying grew 90% over the past year, and 36% over the past six months. Omniture took this to mean that things are slowing, but mentioned the same thought I had — keyword buying should go up considerably as the Christmas season approaches.

4. Your rank in the paid search ads is very important. Being the first in line gives you a 51% chance of being clicked, which drops to 24% in slot 2, and .6% in slot 5. Your chances go up to 5.2% in slot 6. I was thinking that this is probably because you’re the first slot on the second results page.

Your chances of being clicked in the organic results does not drop as fast. My guess on that is because people looking for something often click on many results to get the answer they’re looking for, and only click on a couple of ads (sorry…I always click the ads as a last resort.)

Get the report summary. It’s very interesting.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, April 6th, 2006 at 6:10 pm.
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