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Australians Increasing Online Ad Spend to 22% of Total Budget

posted on April 4, 2007


According to eMarketer, new studies suggest that major Australian advertisers plan to allocate as much as 22% of their total marketing budgets to online advertising.

Strangely, eMarketer doesn’t actually show any charts to confirm this – so we’ll have to take their word for it – but they do demonstrate that search marketing is making a comeback, after dropping from its highest share in 2004.

Here’s a puzzling snippet for you…

Like their US counterparts, a number of marketers think that online ads provide “insufficient accountability.”

Exsqueeze me? A baking powder? (def) Can you get more accountable that internet advertising? That just doesn’t make sense and perhaps I (or eMarketer) have misunderstand the sentiment behind that statement.

Anyway, having recently returned from Sydney, I can tell you that the Australian SEM industry is getting ready to explode. There are a few smart SEMs down there, that can watch their American SEM cousins for the latest practices and bury their competition.


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  • Jordan McCollum

    I hate it when people complain about “accountability” or “tracking” or “measurability” in Internet marketing. I can’t help but wonder how they thought their TV commercial was ‘accountable.’ Did they attach some tracking software to a newspaper to see how many people even looked at the page their ad was on? Did they ‘measure’ how many people tossed their direct mail directly in the trash?

    I realize there is some measure of measurability in these marketing methods, and they’re not worthless, but for someone to complain about a medium like the Internet in that regard? It galls me!

  • http://blogpond.wordpress.com Meg

    Perhaps “lack of accountability” refers to a sense of frustration arising from the placement of irrelevant ads in search engines results.

    For example Google “cemeteries” in Australia and you get an ad for ebay. Am I really looking to buy a cemetery at a bargain price? I don’t think so…

    In terms of accountability, outsourcing SEM and big budgets can lead to complacency in the quality of adverts. So while it’s frustrating from a user point of view, I think that users make advertisers accountable by voting with their mouse.

  • Pingback: Online Advertising in Australia

  • http://www.maxys.com.au Scott Maxworthy

    Had to smile…

    I think it was David Ogilvy – the father of glory days of print and TV advertising that once said “50% of advertising works we just don’t which half”.

    Across all industries the internet disintermediates the middlemen between consumer and producer/ provider.

    There is no question that Internet marketing provides a unique ability to track customers and is a great return on marketing investment but it is most effective when part of an integrated online and offline campaign.

    Another recent report said that Australians lose a day a year frustrated at poor search results – internet marketing is still very hard for most of the 1.9m Australian small businesses – if they are not online the content just isn’t there!

    Scott Maxworthy’s last blog post..Ten steps to SOM – social online marketing

  • http://www.webshout.com.au Sydney Web Design

    Definitely true…

    I personally have witnessed the demand for SEO Consultants during the year of 2008. SEM is becoming the hottest industry of 2008-09. As Scott has mentioned, small businesses are behind when it comes to internet marketing, but there’s a huge demand to close that gap. As Andy has noticed, SEM is soon to explode here in australia (esp. in sydney). Once all these small businesses establish their website, the next thing they’ll be looking for is SEM Marketing Agency.

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