UK search marketing spend on the rise
- Added:
- Apr 21, 2008
The majority of UK advertisers plan to increase their budgets this year for both paid search and natural search, according to new research.
The survey, conducted by a E-consultancy and Neutralize, has found that 63% of companies are planning to increase their budget for paid search in the next 12 months, and that 61% will be investing more in search engine optimisation (SEO or organic search) over the same period.
The 55-page UK Search Engine Marketing Report 2008 gives an overview of the search marketing landscape and is a follow-up to the much-referenced 2007 report, enabling year-on-year comparisons.
More than 1,000 respondents took part in this survey.
Nine per cent of companies surveyed are spending more than £1 million annually on paid search, and one in six companies (16%) is spending at least £50,000 on SEO every year.
Lucy Cokes, Managing Director of search agency Neutralize, said: “It appears evident that search engine marketing is now cemented in the minds and therefore budgets of UK marketers. It is fantastic to see a greater understanding of the benefits of a well-managed search marketing campaign and budgets being increased accordingly across both paid and organic search."
Some 86% of search advertisers are paying to appear on Google’s search results, demonstrating that Google is maintaining its dominance of the paid search landscape.
The percentage of organisations using Yahoo!’s paid search platform has climbed from 45% last year to 49%. The proportion of advertisers using Microsoft’s platform has dropped slightly from 33% last year to 30% this year.
Linus Gregoriadis, E-consultancy’s head of research, said: “The almost universal use of Google by these advertisers echoes its huge market share among search engine users, with Google becoming almost synonymous with search. Yahoo! and Microsoft will be disappointed because they have invested a great deal in their search platforms but the gap is still huge.”
The research also found that 89% of search advertisers rate Google as the best for return on investment and, identically, 89% of company respondents rate Google as the best for quality of traffic. Google is even more dominant for its management tools. An overwhelming 94% of client-side advertisers and 91% of agencies said that Google was the best in this regard.
Gregoriadis added: “As separate entities, Yahoo! and Microsoft are struggling to make significant inroads into Google’s seemingly impregnable position. The overwhelming majority of both advertisers and agencies rate Google as the best for delivering traffic, for ROI and for its management tools which shows that its competitors still have a great deal of catching up to do. It will be fascinating to see what happens if and when Microsoft and Yahoo!therethere merge.”
The full E-consultancy / Neutralize (*\*) UK Search Engine Marketing Report 2008 is available for download at: http://www.e-consultancy.com/publications/search-engine-marketing-report-2008