So says the new SEMPO “State of Search Engine Marketing 2006? report as summarized in MediaPost today:
SEMPO also found that marketers who migrate budgets to search are shifting spending from traditional media. When SEMPO asked respondents who said they had shifted budget to search where that money came from, the top answers included print magazine ads (cited by 20%), direct mail (16%), Web site development (15%), TV ads (13%) and print newspaper ads (13%).
Interestingly yellow pages is absent here, probably because there was little traditional SMB participation in the survey.
Also of interest is the overlap of SEM advertisers (pretty substantial):
Where do marketers buy search ads? Virtually all (96%) use Google AdWords, while 86% have purchased pay-per-click ads on Yahoo and 68% bought search ads on MSN last year.
What this means is that Google advertisers effectively represent 100% of all search engine marketers today because there’s essentially nobody doing SEM that doesn’t advertise on Google. Roughly speaking, that means there are about 500,000 paid search marketers.
–
Greg Sterling is the founding principal of Sterling Market Intelligence, a consulting and research firm focused on online consumer and advertiser behavior and the relationship between the Internet and traditional media, with an emphasis on the local marketplace.
