European search engine marketing is set to enjoy a boom in 2005, a new report claims.
New research from analyst Forrester predicts that the SEM market will grow by 65 per cent this year, compared to 2004, generating 1.4 billion euros of spending.
The company estimates that by 2010, European marketers will spend almost three billion euros on search marketing, up from 856 million euros in 2004.
In the UK, the largest online ad market in Europe, search marketing, will grow to over €1 billion in 2010, boosted by marketers in travel, finance, auto, and retail.
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Date: March 10, 2005
I have been shouting from the rooftops for months now, at everyone that would listen that it is so important to track your offline conversions. I have thought for ages now that a large majority of conversion happened when a customer picked up their telephone and ordered the product over the phone. Or in some cases search on the interet for a product and went to visit a physical store location and made a purchase.
A recent study by ComScore & Overture followed searchers 12 weeks from a "start query" for computer or consumer electronic products to their eventual purchase for. Of all conversions, 92 percent took place offline.
Excerpt from Clickz Online...
The Killer Finding
Would you structure an offline marketing campaign based on the buying behavior of only 8 percent of your audience? If your search ad campaign's success in this vertical is measured only by conversions on your Web site, you're missing 92 percent of search-generated buyers. You're literally optimizing a search spend to maximize conversions on only the tiniest sliver of the potential buying audience. Chances are, these aren't the only online vertical markets with offline conversion dramatically exceeding the online opportunity.
This means retailers who focus only on online return on investment (ROI) could choose to spend 10 times more on search marketing than they currently are and still net positive ROI. By underspending, they fail to reach the majority of their potential customers.
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Date: March 6, 2005
A recent study by Doubleclick shows that purchase related searching takes place long before a transaction and generic search terms dominate purchase related research.
DoubleClick Inc. (NASDAQ: DCLK), the leading provider of marketing solutions for ad agencies, marketers and web publishers, today unveiled a new study, Search Before the Purchase, in conjunction with comScore and DoubleClick’s search marketing division, Performics, to demonstrate how consumers use search engines in the process of making purchases online.
The study, which analyses pre-purchase search activity across four categories (Apparel, Computer Hardware, Sports & Fitness and Travel), showed that roughly half of all online shoppers conducted related research at a search engine before making an online purchase. It also found that most searchers complete their purchase-related search activity weeks in advance of the purchase transaction. While it is widely accepted that searches that lead directly to a purchase are often brand-related search queries, the study shows that brand names of online retailers were in the minority of all the purchase-related searches made during their shopping research.
Key findings and takeaways of the study included:
Buyers conduct many related searches prior to a purchase. Overall, the study found that approximately one out of every two online purchases is preceded by research on a search engine. In the case of the travel segment, nearly three out of four travel buyers consulted search engines before making a purchase.
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