Archive: February, 2009

The Aberdeen Group study concluded that best-in-class organizations balanced their approach to search engine marketing, unlike the average or laggard organizations who were found to be more likely to give search engine marketing an unbridled budget with little or no connection to the rest of their organization. Best-in-class organizations succeed because their view of search engine marketing, itself composed of paid search, paid advertising, and organic search, is best employed in conjunction with other capabilities such as organizational structure, knowledge management, and performance management. The report further specified that success in the relationship between these capabilities is dependant to some degree on employing technologies.

The Aberdeen Group performed a competitive assessment of the capability of performance management and found that the three business levels identified in the study (best-in-class, average, and laggard) shared common performance levels that could be broken down to five categories: process; organization; knowledge; technology; and performance. Each of these five categories were placed in a competitive framework and from these findings the Aberdeen Group was able to state that best-in-class organizations owe their competitive advantage to having a combination of capabilities and technological enablers. This is worth examining in further detail. In the competitive framework, the technology category clearly demonstrated that best-in-class organizations were far more efficient than their competitors in the areas of campaign management, website keyword density analysis, and customer relationship management. This is to say that SEM strategies employed by best-in-class organizations each have technologies that enable formal processes and policies for an automated closed loop marketing design.

With the growth in global Internet traffic, and the increasing demands placed on search results by the surfer who anticipates that the desired returns will not only be on the first results page but will be number one on the charts, an increased demand for efficiency in search engine optimization practices has also grown. Because of the increase in structured content on the Web, and the explosion in the new growth arenas of unstructured content such as blogs, video, audio, and the ever-morphing algorithms of search engines, the Aberdeen Group study had to be inclusive when it defined search engine marketing. As a result, the definition of SEM was broadened to include paid search, paid inclusion, and organic search.

With a broader definition of SEM established, the Aberdeen Group study sought to uncover what drove organizations toward an SEM investment. Of the organizations employing an SEM strategy at the time of the survey, 51% reported that their prime reason for investing in SEM was the need to drive better conversion, followed closely by 44% of respondents who tagged higher website traffic as the prime goal. Two other reasons for venturing into SEM tied at 26%, those being increase in brand awareness and increase in revenue and profit. No matter how these number are cut, the underlying theme hidden in the matrix is that organizations that are tops in their field see SEM strategies as a vital component for conversion to sales.

The great minds and insatiable number crunchers have sat back from the feast table after gorging on the results of a Search Engine Marketing study undertaken in September and October of 2008 by The Aberdeen Group, who according to their website are a “leading provider of fact-based research focused on the global technology-driven value chain.” The Aberdeen Group is a Boston-area outfit that prides itself on being the go-to guys when it comes to understanding the measurable results delivered by technology in business. And so when Metamend was asked to participate in an SEM study directed by The Aberdeen Group, the answer was an automatic yes.

The title of the study was a harbinger for its scope, What Does It Take To Create Best-in-Class Search Engine Marketing? Best Practices in Paid Search, Paid Inclusion, and Search Engine Optimization. Now, don’t let the catchy title fool you, this was a seminal study that surveyed over 200 organizations with the aim of uncovering what practices are employed at best-in-class organizations to separate them from average and laggard players.