Investment in Search Marketing on the Rise
Wednesday, 15 March 2006
More companies and agencies than ever before are investing in search engine marketing, also known as search marketing, according to Stuart Elliott in his March 14 advertising column in The New York Times. Search marketing investments reached approximately $5.1 billion in 2005, and continue to grow faster than traditional avenues such as TV and print media.
Elliott writes that agencies and their companies want to give their clients the opportunity to perform market searches internally instead of having to use outside agencies.
In search marketing, explains Elliott, advertisers pay for their promotional advertisements to appear automatically whenever a consumer types in certain key words. This ties in closely with search engine optimization, or SEO, in which Web sites are analyzed and modified in order to improve their standing when consumers perform searches.
Many Web site owners these days are thinking about including the search feature in order to keep up with the recent search-related advertising trend, Elliott writes.
According to David Hallerman, eMarketer senior analyst, marketers were at first leery of investing in search marketing, but have since warmed up to the idea. “They have seen it is very effective,” he commented.
eMarketer predicted last week that search engine marketing returns would reach nearly $6.5 billion in 2006, an increase of $1.4 billion from the previous year, eventually rising to $10 billion by the end of the decade.
As the trend towards search marketing continues, agencies are pouring more money into understanding and utilizing these new search tools, Elliott notes.
To read the complete New York Times article, click on http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/14/business/media/14adco.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print