Research released today by the Internet Advertising Bureau’s (IAB) Search Council – a committee consisting of Bing, Google, Yahoo!, ten search marketing specialists and five brands - provides insights into the search marketing landscape, highlighting knowledge gaps, trends, budget changes and the power of integration.
The Search Marketing Barometer 2012 is the second wave of research to understand the search marketing landscape. A mix of traditional and digital marketers from the top 200 brands were surveyed in order to obtain a cross sector market overview for both digital and more specifically, search in 2011.
Key findings
- Brand: around a third of brands use paid and natural search to build brand and generate awareness as their primary objectives
- Mobile: 44% of brands don’t have a mobile optimised website
- Integration: 72% of brands state their campaigns are partially or not at all integrated with the wider media mix, while 94% said there is greater opportunity to integrate search
- Data: only 13% of brands feel they have a sufficient amount of performance data
- Attribution: 58% of brands have little to no understanding at all of attribution modelling
The study reveals a significant lack of understanding (53%) of digital at board level - attribution being the least understood with 58% of brands claiming low to very low understanding of this area. However this lack of understanding isn’t stunting digital budget growth with nearly two thirds of respondents reporting over 20% of their budgets being allocated solely to digital last year. Both SEO (48%) and PPC (49%) budgets are expected to increase this year as well as social media budgets (68%).
The research indicated that search integration is still a challenge for many marketers, with two thirds stating that their campaigns are only ‘partially’ integrated with search. However those marketers that have integrated their search activity into their wider marketing mix have seen tangible benefits (62%). Display (65%) and social media are the two most popular disciplines integrated with search but a surprising 94% claimed that they still feel there is a greater opportunity to integrate the discipline into their extensive media campaigns.
The study exposed that a significant proportion of brands (over 40%) across a range of sectors still don’t have a mobile optimised website even though nearly 70% believe that mobile search will overtake desktop search by 2015. The study also revealed that only one third thought that their website was good at achieving their core marketing objectives.
Jack Wallington, chair of the IAB Search Council from 2008 to 2012, said: “It’s exciting to see positive results for brands that not only understand but have already acted on search trends like integration, mobile and social media. The Search Council’s ‘Search for Integration’ report, released last year, addresses all of the pain points found in this research and should therefore be on the desktop of every marketer in 2012.”
