Marketing budgets have steadily been on the rise since the slashes that followed the dotcom bubble. However, management is requiring greater accountability for all marketing programs.

Indeed, CEOs are focused on getting the best ROI (return on investment) from their marketing efforts. An ANA (Association of National Advertisers) survey earlier this year pegs marketing accountability as job one for senior marketing personnel.

In a Partners and Simons survey, senior marketing executives at life sciences companies reported that marketing budgets are growing and management is requiring more accountability for marketing dollars.

• 77 percent of respondents said their marketing budgets had increased over the past three years..
• 64 percent said the percentage of sales revenues spent on marketing has increased.
• Marketers reported spending more on lead-generation tactics, including interactive marketing (54 percent).
• 82 percent of respondents said management is requiring greater accountability in the marketing budget spend.

An April ANA survey of national marketers conducted with Marketing Management Analytics (Aegis Group) and Forrester Research revealed that 61.5 percent of respondents believe advertising accountability should be defined, measured and implemented. However, only 19 percent are satisfied with their ability to take these steps.

Search Engine Marketing -- The Accountable Medium

With search engine marketing (SEM), you can analyze your website traffic to identify user behavior. This helps you serve customers better while improving your own profitability.

Traffic analysis can yield information that improves marketing efficiency in two important areas: It can help you make site changes to improve your conversion rates, and it can guide your marketing campaigns to achieve better ROI. However, it’s not always easy to know what to measure and why.

Traffic Analysis Data

Web logs provide user activity information on your website traffic. Analyzing your web logs will familiarize you with the way visitors use your site. You can collect baseline information that tells you:

• Total Page Views
• Daily Unique Visitors
• Hourly Unique Visitors
• Total Visits
• First Time Visitors
• Repeat Visitors
• Daily Returning Visitors

Then you can look at:

• Average Page Views per Visitor
• Average Visits per Visitor
• Average Visit Length
• Average Page Views per Hour of this Day
• Average Unique Visitors per Hour of This Day
• Average Visits per Hour of This Day

E-commerce sites will find these statistics of value:

• Total Revenue
• Total Orders
• Total Unique Buyers
• Most Active and Least Active Time Period
• Shopping Cart Abandonment Rate
• First Time Visitor Conversions
• Repeat Visitor Conversions
• Buyer to Browser Ratio

This raw data resides in your web logs, but it's hard to analyze and interpret without traffic analysis tools.

Organic Listings -- Prime Real Estate

Savvy marketers know the best links are organic. Known as natural or algorithmic listings, these links are the non-sponsored, free listings that appear in the major search engines upon keyword queries. Organic listings are derived from databases built by search engine spiders and ranked by proprietary search algorithms generally based on relevant content, proper HTML coding and quality inbound links.

Research shows that search engine users prefer organic links to sponsored links in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

• comScore and others have reported that 70 to 80 percent of users click organic rather than sponsored listings.
• Earlier this year, Jupiter research found that six out of seven sales resulting from search engines originated in the organic search listings.

Based on the clickability of organic listings, it’s safe to assume that well-optimized websites will achieve their business goals. Industry research has documented this in both case studies and research studies.

• Research: Industry research has shown benefits for both corporate and retail sites with organic search engine optimization (SEO). Two separate studies revealed enormous gains in conversions and unique visitors for well-optimized sites. In one instance, a 142 percent increase in conversion rates was reported the first month the sites appeared on page one in Google. The second month, conversion rates went to 194 percent over the prior month. Unique visitors went sky-high, with a 337 percent increase the first month and 627 percent increase the second month.
• Case Study: A SEMPO case study reported dramatic results with SEO for a connector manufacturer. Starting with a baseline of 15 top-30 rankings, it went up to 79 in six months, then 102 in four more months. The site is in the top nine on Google for specific phrases and increased highly targeted visitors three fold over baseline in one year.

So you’d think that most corporate websites are search-engine optimized to achieve these types of results. Instead, research shows that only about 10 to 12 percent of corporate websites are optimized for prominent organic listings. The same goes for big retail sites and for B2B manufacturing sites -- despite the extraordinary gains reported in unique visitors and conversions on properly optimized sites. .

Why haven’t the majority of corporate websites embraced organic SEO? Perhaps there’s a little confusion and lack of education. Or maybe it’s hard to get funding. Whatever the reason, it’s time for corporate America to get educated and embrace organic SEO because this marketing strategy is effective, accountable and yields long-lasting results.

Funding Your Organic SEO Program

SEMPO research shows that as many as 43 percent of advertisers created new budgets for organic SEO, and these were mostly large companies. Most advertisers shifted money from existing marketing programs to fund organic SEO or used a combination of new funding and shifted funds. The three tips below can help your funding efforts.

Shake the Decision-Makers: The first step is to convince the decision makers that organic SEO is an essential marketing strategy for improving the bottom line. One of the best ways to do this is to provide a senior-level manager who believes in your cause with the data and research to convince the others.

This shouldn’t be hard to do because there is ample research indicating SEO generates more conversions compared to other marketing strategies. It is also pretty easy to validate organic SEO as cost-effective compared to TV advertising, radio ads and print. Organic SEO is accountable and can document gains in unique visitors, conversions and return on investment. Lastly, there is research showing organic SEO is effective for branding.

There is plenty of ammunition, and I’ve assembled everything your senior manager needs to evangelize. Just drop me an email and I’ll be happy to send you the data. It’s just a matter of finding the right person to influence your decision makers.

Follow the Competition: A second tip is to find someone qualified to provide you with a competitor analysis identifying competitors who outperform your company’s website popularity. This exercise is usually very motivating in itself and often leads to several opportunities for improving your company’s website and increasing your conversions.

Chase the Lost Opportunity: A third way to convince any skeptic is to estimate the lost-opportunity cost. You can use WordTracker or the Yahoo! Search Marketing Keyword Selector Tool to learn the number of searches for your company’s strategic key terms, and then estimate the number of likely unique visitors and conversions that are being missed by your website not being listed prominently in the major SERPs.

How Much Should You Budget?

Marketing budgets are usually established as a percentage of sales. This can vary tremendously from business to business. For instance, the pharmaceutical industry notoriously spends about 20 percent of sales on advertising, but other industries may allocate only one or two percent. While the average is about six percent, it’s best to research what’s customary in your industry when setting your marketing budget.

Depending on your website history, its anatomy, content, industry keywords and competitors, a qualified SEO business analyst can determine the best practice SEO procedures and services required. In fact, the average company SEO project costs about $3 per day per keyword (give or take). You should be able to generate 10 times that per day in additional business by being found more often in the search engines.

You can reduce your costs with training and tools for in-house SEO maintenance, or you can have a fully outsourced solution at a higher rate. Training a team and arming them with the tools and knowledge of “what to do” will run around $1,500 per person. Fully outsourcing an organic SEO campaign can cost from $1,000 to $5,000 per month to start, depending on the variables mentioned above. Organic SEO projects can be customized to fit almost any budget; the key to savings is in knowledge transfer.