As study cited by MediaPost.com conducted by Shop.org and Forrester Research entitled: State Of Retailing Online 2013: Marketing &; Merchandising, found that “U.S. companies will invest about 40% of their $7.6 million aggregate marketing budget in paid search and 14% to organic search.”
Some 80% of the survey participants in the “” report admit they will spend more on paid search about 71% said they will spend more on product listing ads (PLAs), 63% on re-marketing and re-targeting, and 55% on organic search.”
“Organic search now sits at No.5 on the list of growing marketing investments, coming in behind paid search and email marketing, which now rank No. 1 and No. 2, respectively, up from No. 3 and No. 4 in 2011.”
“While the majority of retailers surveyed said that paid search was equally or less cost effective in 2012 compared with the prior year, 68% agreed they were able to drive more revenue from paid search programs. ”
“They also agreed there is no better customer acquisition vehicle than search engine optimization in general.”
“Search engine marketing continues to become a stronger acquisition media. Some 75% of marketers cited search engine marketing as being the top traditional interactive marketing tool, followed by organic search at 52%, and affiliate programs at 35%”
SEO will continue to grow as more and more companies see how important an online presence is to their overall success.
That doesn’t make sense. You copied it from MediaPost, and it doesn’t make sense there! Since the report is available only for $499.00, I had to research to get the context:
– How retailers spend their online marketing dollars, internetretailer.com/2013/07/16/how-retailers-spend-their-online-marketing-dollars
Okay. It’s $7.6 million spread among 65 companies, about 20 of which generate $100 million or more in revenue, the rest lower. The rest of the companies in the poll are SO small, they dragged the average down!
The point is, paid search is healthy and growing. This is because companies are advertising for free. CPC is down, because people no longer click the test/image ads.
Insider’s secret
Display ads for FREE! Pay for CPC ads so publishers realize only a fraction of the revenue received, as the obnoxious Google CPC ads work as display ads.
Click though rates probably describe a fraction of the mindshare CPC ads create, as people see the HUGE google ads, then continue scrolling the page.
Further, the lag time ads create which make a site difficult to scroll work to ensure those above-the-fold ads get viewed.
Free advertising for everyone!