At Nowspeed we do a lot of Search Engine Marketing work, so it’s easy to take for granted that everyone understands why it’s important. Here are a couple of stats that I share in my conference presentations that may help put it into context.
Last year over $8 billion was spent on paid search marketing and this is projected to grow to over $11 billion by 2010 according to the Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organization (SEMPO). All direct marketing spending if the US last year was about $166 billion. Search marketing is taking a larger and larger share of total direct marketing spending and is growing faster than any other area.
Marketing Sherpa recently ran a survey and asked which types of programs people thought worked “great” and which ones “disappointed”. Paid search marketing came out on top with 52% saying it worked great and only 8% were disappointed. Clearly this is an important area for most companies.
