Commentary

$4.7 Billion Spent for Preferred Placement on Search Engines

$4.7 Billion Spent for Preferred Placement on Search Engines

According to a report released recently by the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO), advertisers in the U.S. and Canada spent $5.75 billion on Search Engine Marketing (SEM) in 2005, a 44 percent increase over 2004 spending.

The report projects that SEM spending in North America will reach $11 billion in 2010. (The annual totals include payments to search engines and search-related media companies, search engine marketing agencies and in-house expenditures in support of such programs. The programs include paid placement, paid inclusion, organic search engine optimization and search engine marketing technology platforms.)

Paid placement in 2005 accounted for 83 percent or $4.7 billion of the total. Organic SEO accounted for approximately 11 percent of overall spending, paid inclusion accounted for just 4 percen, and SEM technologies accounted for less than 2 percent of overall spending.

SEMPO Research Committee Co-chair, Gord Hotchkiss, said "... Future growth will be fueled by an increased search presence from major advertisers and new monetization strategies from the major engines..."

Additionally, the recently released comScore MediaMetrix qSearch analysis showed that Americans conducted 5.15 billion searches online during November 2005, up 9 percent from November 2004, with Google maintaining its lead in the U.S. search market with 39.8 percent of all the searches submitted.

 

Share of Online Searches Total U.S. Home, Work and University Internet Users

 

Nov 2004%

Nov 2005%

Point Change+/-

Total Internet Population

100

100

0

Google Sites

34.6

39.8

+5.2

Yahoo! Sites

32.0

29.5

-2.5

MSN-Microsoft Sites

16.0

14.2

-1.8

Time Warner Network

9.1

8.7

-0.4

Ask Jeeves

5.5

6.5

+1.0

 Source: comScore qSearch, November 2005

 

For further analysis and additional data, download The State of Search Engine Marketing 2005.

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