April 06, 2007 | Friday

Online marketing predictors: 2007

By Jackie Danicki - Blogger in Marketing |Online Sales |PPC |Search Engines |Yahoo |SEO

Three significant surveys have been doing the rounds in the last day or so, all of which are noteworthy for what they reveal of how businesses are approaching online marketing and search in particular. Here are the condensed highlights of all three.

Business Week‘s survey reveals:

Across all ad budget levels, the top media to see the biggest intended increases in the next year are “online brand,” TV and search in that order. Interestingly, search was to see the largest increase in the category of advertisers spending $750+ million or more on marketing

Internet Retailer talked to retailers who are selling online and found:

[S]earch engine marketing drives more than 50% of sales for 30.2% of responding e-retailers. 82.8% of all survey respondents also have no plans to reduce their overall spending on pay-per-click search engine marketing this year.

The survey notes that web retailers view their paid and natural search engine marketing programs as a better sales and advertising tool than other forms of marketing, including affiliates, e-mail and direct mail.

Finally, this is what the members of the Yahoo Publisher Networked said when YPN asked, ”How do you plan to drive traffic to your site(s) in 2007?” (Answers are broken down by percentage response.)

Paid advertising (e.g. sponsored search, contextual or graphical advertising)—17
Actively getting links to your site on other sites—26
Outbound emails—1
Viral efforts (e.g. Tell A Friend, bookmarking)—10
Organic search engine optimization (SEO)—33
Offline activities (e.g. mailers, PR, local ads, etc.)—4
Other—9

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