Social Media is Top Priority in 2011 for PPC and SEO
During a webinar given by Craig Macdonald, senior vice president and chief marketing officer of SEM and SEO software and agency services provider Covario, two surveys were taken to gauge the top PPC and SEO priorities for advertisers in 2011. Not surprisingly, social media was a big part of both responses.
The webinar covered a list of top priorities for search marketing in 2011. Macdonald proclaimed that 2011 will be the “Year of Facebook.” He estimated that advertisers are planning to spend about 10-20 percent of their pay-per-click (PPC) budgets on Facebook next year. Macdonald notes that this budget is not coming out of PPC, but from display and offline budgets, “or as an incremental override to the overall digital budget, specifically increasing the shift toward digital more aggressively.”
He also notes that Covario is seeing 2011 PPC budgets increasing at a 15 percent rate from 2010, and that 2010 budgets were up 18 percent from 2009.
What about the Bing-Yahoo (or “Bing-Hoo”) partnership? Macdonald asserts that the integration of the two search engines will have no significant impact on PPC market share in the U.S. or in EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa).
However, Macdonald pointed out that Covario expects Yahoo to lose market share in APAC (Asia, Pacific Islands, Australia and China), thanks to Naver going to an internal system and Yahoo Japan moving to the Google platform.
Google’s quarterly paid search spending is growing quickly and reached nearly $80 million in the third quarter of 2010, according to Covario. Yahoo was second with paid search spending approaching $18 million in the third quarter, while Bing followed with nearly $10 million in the same quarter. Baidu followed with about $5 million in the third quarter.
However, in APAC, Google and Baidu are both experiencing rapid growth, while Yahoo experiences slower growth.
Macdonald also noted that 2011 will not be the year of mobile search in the U.S., as mobile will continue to drive less than 5 percent of all search advertising. The webinar also expressed an expectation that advertisers will test Google TV in the second half of 2011. Lastly, Macdonald forecast that 2011 will see more integration of search into other forms of media and “will become far more mature and operational within the organizations and budgeting of most large advertisers.”
The first survey Macdonald conducted covered the PPC top priorities for advertisers in 2011. Of the 307 attendees/respondents, 46 percent answered “Social Media Advertising on Facebook, LinkedIn,” while 18 percent answered “Local Search Advertising Programs” and 14 percent answered “Managing Impact of Google Instant.”
The second survey covered the SEO top priorities for advertisers in 2011. Here, 36 percent answered “SEO/Social Media Program Integration,” followed by 30 percent who answered “Link-Building Programs” and 16 percent who answered “Improving the Content Management Process.”
Source:
