Five key insights from our Search Engine Marketing Benchmark Report

Search marketing budgets are set to rise, with companies increasing spend on PPC and SEO in 2014.

58% of companies plan to increase their paid search budgets this year, up from 55% in 2013, while 55% will spend more on SEO, up from 51% a year ago.

These findings come from the UK Search Engine Marketing Benchmark Report 2014, produced in association with Latitude.

Here are a few of the key findings from the report…

By Graham Charlton May 15th 2014 17:34

Companies see the need for marketing budget flexibility

Effective digital marketing means seeing what works and what doesn’t, and switching tactics as appropriate. It seems that companies are increasingly using this approach.

Only 13% of responding companies have marketing budgets that are rigidly split by channel. This is good news given the increasingly integrated and agile nature of effective marketing.

The majority of companies either have flexibility to shift budget across channels based on ROI (43%) or have no channel splits in their digital marketing budget (44%).

Do you have separate budgets for different digital marketing channels? (company respondents)

CRO budgets are set to rise

Companies will be the most likely to increase their budget for conversion rate optimisation.

This backs up our Conversion Rate Optimisation report last year, which found that 87% of marketers believe that CRO has become more important over the last five years.

CRO can work well and deliver a greater ROI than other options, as these case studies show.

Three in five companies expect to be allocating more financial resource to CRO, while 58% and 55% (respectively) will be doing the same for paid search and SEO.

Do you expect your budgets to increase or decrease in the next 12 months? (company respondents)

Effective measurement is a problem

It appears that measuring the impact of investment in digital channels has become more problematic.

Only 36% of companies stated that they have ‘a definitive tracking solution to measure consistently across different digital channels’.

Do you or your clients have a definitive tracking solution to measure consistently across different digital channels?

Just 44% are currently able to measure paid search return on investment (ROI) effectively, down from 53% last year.

Measuring ROI for search engine optimisation has been even more problematic, with a 14% drop in the proportion of companies effectively tracking return on investment in this area.

Meanwhile, companies were most likely to select measuring success as the key barrier to success in their social media marketing and display advertising efforts.

Sentiment towards Enhanced Campaigns is far from positive

Enhanced Campaigns were introduced by Google last year, and were not universally welcomed. Despite the name, many search marketers felt that this move made their lives more difficult.

The removal of the ability to target campaigns to specific devices was a major gripe, as was the increased costs of the new system.

A year or so on from its introduction, we asked marketers and it seems that sentiment towards Enhanced Campaigns isn’t too positive.

What impact has Google’s introduction of Enhanced Campaigns had on your / your clients’ paid search marketing?

Only 14% of companies say that Enhanced Campaigns have had a positive effect on paid search marketing, mostly due to improvements to mobile search.

Meanwhile, a quarter of responding companies say impact has been non-existent and more than half (53%) are still yet to make their mind with regards to the service.

Companies that felt Enhanced Campaigns had a negative impact seemed to be uncomfortable with the forced inclusion of mobile campaigns and the general increase in cost.

Here are some comments from respondents:

This is a mixed bag. When the adverts went live, Google defaulted it so that they made more money which is not good. However, once you get to grip with the filters they do allow for better targeting.

Customers are currently unable to purchase our products on mobile and tablet, and as such we are wasting 20% of our PPC budget on tablet advertising.

Few marketers are making extensive use of Google+

This year’s research illustrates most marketers’ apathy to Google’s social endeavours.

Though some brands are making efforts with Google+, most companies are making limited efforts to exploit the opportunities which are available.

65% of companies reported that they have created Google+ brand pages.
26% are adding video and images to Google+ local pages.
28% are encouraging customers to engage and share content on Google+.
19% have encouraged staff to create accounts on G+.

Some marketers have been exploring its impact on search-related activities. 26% have researched the impact of search engine visibility, while 22% have linked their Google+ accounts to AdWords campaigns.

Bearing in mind that more companies use paid advertising opportunities on Facebook (74%), Twitter (37%) and LinkedIn (37%), it is fair to assume marketers are generally unconvinced about the benefits of Google+.

Article SEO

The real reason your marketing costs are increasing

If you ask anyone in the industry what the biggest trends and challenges of the last 12 months have been you will receive a range of answers.

Chances are the answer will involve ‘not provided’ and content marketing if you are speaking to someone working in the SEO field.

If you are talking to someone with a PPC focus they will probably cite PLAs or rising CPCs.

If it’s a social guy you’re chatting to he will tell you how his channel is finally starting to deliver an ROI.

They will probably all talk about the phenomenal growth in mobile and tablet usage.

What there seems to be very little discussion about right now though is the marked increase in the amount of times potential customers visit your site before committing to a purchase.

This is partly influenced by the changes in device usage but is also symptomatic of changes in user behaviour – price comparison, voucher usage, and the convergence of offline and online worlds all contribute to this trend.

The challenge it creates is how to limit the amount of times we are paying to bring these same users back to the site, and how to pay as little as possible each time.

It’s a challenge which affects everyone working in digital and will hopefully drive more unified strategies, and make us all work closer together.

Article Behavioural targeting

A guide to personalised advertising online

Hello Brian. There are many ways an online ad can be personalised and targeted.

In this introduction to personalised ads online, I thought I’d order the information by marketing channel, rather than by types of targeting.

Ads can be targeted to behaviour, demographic, time and audience. Most people think of personalisation as a little more tailored than, say, device type, and more about personal information that a company has about you, be it name and age, or browsing and purchase behaviour.

Personalisation, despite implying one-to-one interaction, is often a more sophisticated automated and rules-based take on traditional segmentation of a database and delivery of a marketing message.

It can be based on information you have given to a company or on information inferred or collected with tags, or matched up with third-party data.

With marketing technology becoming more sophisticated and at the same time arguably easier to use, personalisation is an area set for prominence in marketing over the next couple of years.

CRM software allows companies to tailor web experiences to different segments of users and this redefines the purpose of a previously static web page or marketing message.

In this post though, I’m concentrating on advertising online and how it is personalised. Away we go!

Article SEO

A third of businesses outsource paid search and display: report

The decision on whether to outsource specific digital marketing activities is impacted by a range of factors, but in general it comes down to resource and business priorities.

Some channels clearly benefit from being brought in-house, such as social media and content marketing, but others are just as effective when operated by a third-party.

The new UK Search Engine Marketing Benchmark Report published by Econsultancy and Latitude investigates which digital marketing activities are most commonly outsourced, with the results showing that three in 10 companies are conducting their paid search (30%) and display (28%) advertising entirely through an agency.

In contrast, three-quarters of companies handle their analytics (75%) and social media marketing (73%) in-house.