Submitted by sherwood on January 10, 2006 - 7:49pm.
A new SEMPO study reports that the bulk of search marketing spending goes to paid search, while only 11 percent is dedicated to natural search.
Paid search offers the comfort of exact accountability (click fraud aside) so it's popularity is no surprise, especially given the number of traditional ad agencies currently getting into the game.
But usability guru Jacob Nielsen raises some doubts. His latest Alertbox column declares that, in the bidding wars of paid search, only the search engines are truly winning. For every gain that websites achieve in conversion rates and effective keyword buying, the increased revenue is used to justify ever more competitive keyword bidding, driving-up keyword prices in a never-ending spiral.
At some point, the relative certainty of a paid search spend becomes an absolute certainty that you've paid too much for those clicks. Hopefully marketers will start looking for a more even balance point between paid and natural search.
