A joint study by iProspect and Jupiter Research expected to be released today found that 81 percent of organizations use search marketing metrics, such as Web site traffic and search engine ranking,
to evaluate the workers responsible for search engine marketing. According to the study--based on a survey of 636 search engine marketers and 224 search engine marketing agencies--four out of five
search engine marketers have their performance evaluations tied to some search engine marketing metric, while half of search marketing employees are evaluated on Web site traffic volume. Performances
are tied to total sales generated by search marketing for just four out of 10 employees, and only 7 percent have their performance tied to traffic to brick-and-mortar locations attributable to search
marketing.
--Shankar Gupta