Marketing Pilgrim

I’m not kidding. While they might like you personally, most companies engaged in SEM are beyond disappointed with their returns, according to a new study from SEM firm [x+1].

First, the good news: Almost half of respondents—48.6%—said that the economy has had no impact on their SEM budget. And these aren’t little companies: 39% of these companies represented had a marketing/advertising budget of $5 to $10 million, and 7.5% had even more than that.

Also good: of those surveyed, 55.2% said that the champion of SEM in their company was at the director-level or above—with the CEO being the champion in 13.1% of companies.

But there looks to be quite a bit of bad news here. (I did say your clients hate you, didn’t I?). When asked how highly they’d rate their companies’ SEM performance, only 20% rated it a 6 or 7 out of 7:

The Online Publishers Association (OPA) would like you to know that just because a consumer doesn’t click on your display ad, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t effective!

In fact, according to its new study, “The Silent Click: Building Brands Online,” OMA says the money you spend on display advertising contributes towards your other marketing efforts. The findings include:

• One in five conduct related searches and one in three visit the brands’ sites
• Users spent over 50% more time than the average visitor to these sites and consumed more pages
• Users spent about 10% more money online overall, and significantly more on product categories related to the advertised brands
• Higher income audiences visited the advertisers sites

As with most things, the news about social media is not news to those who have been around for a while. The reality is that the largest proportion of social media users are relatively new to the party. While this makes social media veterans groan and cry into their energy drinks it’s just the facts. While most veterans of Twitter and other social media outlets get the idea of “social media identity theft” most mortals don’t equate identity theft with anything other than their finances.

The New York Times ran an article about this problem of maintaining your online identity and what it can entail. When it hits the mainstream press then we know that there is a real issue (not because it is breaking the news but more so because it has finally caught up to the news). The Times says

Is Google scared of Microsoft’s apparent early success with Bing?

Of course not, Bing’s so far only managed to gain a couple of points in market share, why would Google be scared of it? Right?

Well, someone over at Google is scared of Bing, because the search engine leader has just launched an initiative to remind its users of the underlying technology that makes Google better than Bing. When you visit the Google.com homepage, you’ll see a link “Discovering the web” which, when clicked, takes you to a page that looks like this:

The page has many reminders of what’s “under the hood” and even has videos to explain the benefits of using Google.

Google is often a victim of its own success. While there is little cause to go out and throw a pity party for them, it is an interesting study to see what a Google does to manage the pains that come with getting so big so fast. The Wall Street Journal examines the continued problem of Google bleeding top talent as employees leave for start-ups, often taking with them the innovation that Google needs to expand beyond its King of Search status. It’s a good problem to have considering the times but one that is getting real attention from the C-level folks in the company (in between trips to Washington, DC, of course).

The gist of the problem is

While there is a lot of hubbub around the impact that Bing is having on the overall search engine landscape, there is another press darling that is joining the search race. That’s right, it’s Twitter! At All Things Digital it is reported that according to comScore the Twitter searches accounted for .001 percent of overall searches for May of ’09.

So let the questioning begin. The first one that comes to mind for me is that if this were any other entity than Twitter would comScore even mention the search vehicle? As Peter Kafka asks as well, would we even report on anything that has such a minuscule number attached to it?

An analyst from Citigroup said