Search Engine Marketing

One of the most powerful marketing weapons in a company’s online arsenal is Search Engine Marketing, also known as SEM. A specialized subset of direct marketing, where SEM marketers promote websites and products by increasing their visibility in search results on search engines like Google, Yahoo, or Ask.com. These search results can be organic or paid.


Organic Search

With organic search, each search engine uses its own proprietary algorithms for returning the most relevant results to a user’s request. The more relevant the result, the higher the ranking on the page. Results of eyetracking studies show that most users immediately scan the top left portion of search results pages or the position of the top organic result.

Most companies use in-house experts or third party experts to constantly tinker with their site’s metadata in order to optimize results rankings. ROI calculations for these activities are measured by the cost of such activities against the increases in traffic post-optimization.


Paid Search

Paid search is one of the fastest growing areas of advertising today. Overall, industry monitors say ad spending will be the weakest since 2001 -- growing just 1.7% to $152.3 billion, a marked drop from its previous forecast of 2.6% growth. (TNS Media Intelligence 6/12/07). Network television is expected to grow only 1.3% and newspaper expected to decrease by 2.9%.

By comparison, while slowing from the meteoric rise of 2003 and 2004, paid search is expected to still grow by 16.4% this year.

With Paid search, return on investment measurement starts with the initial organic search metric of traffic generation. However, unlike organic search, with paid search we can also track leads and conversions directly resulting from our efforts, with a discrete quantifiable cost. Companies purchase keywords, knowing that each consumer sent to the website will cost a specific amount. A retail company can then follow that single user through to sale, providing a hard ROI metric. Generally, paid search listing pass the user directly to a sell opportunity with ROI being the efficiency of online search spend to actual sales.

"To become aware of the
possibility of the search
is to be onto something"
-Walker Percy

In the case of numerous companies today, they direct traffic from paid search links to their company portals and then redirects to channel partners.

Due to the circuitous route to sale, our ROI measurement must include traffic generation efficiency, amount of pages consumed and time spent on the site by users, as well as how many leads are passed to our channel partners. To get to a hard number, a monetary value must be assigned to each of these “soft” metrics.

While the DM function of search is generally the most relevant to a sales-oriented company, recently there has been a rise in the discussion of the branding abilities of SEM. Every result, organic or paid, can be viewed as an ‘advertisement’ for the company or product. The reason to use SEM for branding is that, if done correctly, it can be much more efficient than display advertising. By using pre/post search campaign Dynamic Logic studies we can understand any supplemental branding component our search campaigns provide our marketing efforts.


Search and Measuring the ROI of Offline Campaigns

An interesting aspect of search is that it can also be used to benchmark success of offline campaigns. These ‘success metrics’ can be seen in the traffic resulting from organic search, paid search and even social media.

Successful offline campaigns should cause an increase in the number of searches for brands and/or products featured in these campaigns. With geo-targeted advertising (eg. Spot TV, radio or billboards), we can study traffic sources to see if there is a rise in searches from those specific geographic areas.

Offline campaign success will also be evidenced in our paid search results. The number of impressions our paid search terms receive will rise as we gain top of mind status with consumers. Our clicks should rise proportionately and we can measure increases in pages viewed and time spent to provide a pre/post campaign metric.

Search engine marketing can be an extremely efficient traffic driver & sales tool for any brand - used effectively; SEM can provide the most accountable ROI marketing program.


David Glitzer
Director Interactive Services
Cheil Communications New Jersey