Guava, a fresh thinking, digital marketing agency specialising in Search Marketing, Web Development, Search Engine Optimisation, and PPC in the UK has released a new study on the industry. Guava is part of the pan-European Guava group with over 200 employees, the UK division is headed up by UK CEO, Graeme Radford with offices in Berkshire and Cornwall. Current Guava clients include Confused.com, Black & Decker and The Royal Mail. So, when they talk, I usually listen. The upshot of the research is that money spent on SEO is providing a better ROI then ever before.
The proportion of people who say that they are tracking paid search return on investment has increased from 33% last year to 45% in 2009. For SEO, there has been an even bigger increase in those tracking ROI effectively. This statistic has jumped from 20% to 35%.
Lucy Cokes, Director at Guava, said: “We were delighted by the response to the surveys…” He goes on to sya how amazing his company is. Kind of reminds me of a rapper or right wing talk show host explaining how yes, he is well and truly awesome. Anyways, I digress…..
Lucy Cokes, Director at Guava, goes on to say that “companies want to take more control of this element of their marketing.” Duh…
Here are some useful tidbits of info
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Approximately half as many responding organisations (44%) use Yahoo, whilst a third (30%) are using Live (Microsoft’s platform). Yahoo has taken the biggest hit since last year’s survey, with 5% fewer company marketers now using Yahoo for paid search. Similarly, 7% fewer agencies say their clients pay to advertise on Yahoo’s search results pages. |
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§It is clear that Google remains king, with 85% of responding companies utilising the search engine for paid search. 94% of agencies say their clients typically pay to advertise on Google. |
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§ Only 5% of respondents report that the end of best practice funding has negatively impacted their return on investment. The change in Google’s trademark bidding policy has had more of an impact, with 15% of company respondents citing this as a negative factor affecting ROI. |
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§ Survey respondents were asked specifically about the factors which had negatively affected their return on investment from paid search in the last 12 months. The higher cost of clicks emerged as the most significant issue and CPC (cost-per-click) inflation is being driven both by increased competition and efforts by the search engines to extract as much profit as they can while still delivering return on investment. |
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§ Just over a third of respondents (37%) said that the credit crunch was an issue and a similar proportion (34%) said that lower conversion rates were negatively impacting ROI. These factors are very closely related. |
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§Only 5% of companies are paying to advertise on mobile search listings and, surprisingly, that percentage has not increased since last year although 23% are planning to do this. More than two thirds of respondents say this is either not on the radar yet (37%) or that they have no plans to use mobile search (32%). |
The full Econsultancy / Guava UK Search Engine Marketing Benchmarking Report 2009 is available for download at: www.guava.co.uk/uksem2009
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