SEO and SEA thrive while Google campaign prices keep growing

Fri 4 June 2010 12:43, J-P De Clerck

Econsultancy just released its UK Search Engine Marketing Benchmarking Report 2010 in collaboration with Guava. The report found that UK companies “have ramped up their investment in paid search and SEO this year as the economy has emerged tentatively from recession”.

60% of UK businesses tend to increase their spending on SEO over the next year. In the 2009 report 55% said they intended to do so.

But SEO is not the only form of search engine marketing, thriving in the UK. Econsultancy found that pay-per-click search advertising “is also buoyant”.

52% of companies intend to raise their SEA budgets. In 2009 45% said they would do so.

It seems that, after a few though years, the SEM market is poised for an increased growth. During the recession, search engine marketing was one of the few marketing areas where businesses increased their spending.

The increased media cost of Google AdWords

Research Director Linus Gregoriadis says that “companies continue to report an increased media cost for paid search, and in particular for Google AdWords, but this has not stopped the majority of companies increasing their Google investment. Sixty per cent of company respondents said they are investing more on Google than they were a year ago, compared to only 10% who are spending less.”

So, despite the fact that in social media and social bookmarking platforms there are good opportunities for cost-effective pay-per-click, Google keeps growing.

The data prove what Gregoriadis says about Google AdWords: 69% of the search advertisers that were surveyed and use Google say “that prices for the keywords they routinely bid on have gone up in the last year”.

Among agencies, this percentage is even higher (71%).

You can find more information and buy the report here.

The author is a 360 degrees interactive marketer and serial blogger. You can connect with him on Twitter here.

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Comments (1)

- Tom Bogaert
- [website]
Jp,

Interesting stuff. It would also be nice to know why advertisers tend to bid higher

- because of more competition (avg. position sliding)
- because they know more about the return of their investment, allowing to bid more themselves
- they don't know
- other reasons???

prices going up is not that big deal as long as the return is ok.

Sun 6 Jun 2010, 13:51

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