Google have just sponsored a report by the Economist Intelligence Unit - called the Future of Marketing, however they might as well have called it "Ditch your search spend and put it into email" needless to says it's mostly drivel.

Also has anyone else noticed how 'Search Engine Optimisation' vanished from the "Which online advertising strategy produces the best ROI for your company?" and "How difficult is it to measure the impact of the following online marketing activities?" charts, yet appears in other references to online advertising and promotion strategies within the report, and which appear to use the same strategy list.

'Search Engine Optimisation' is in all the other charts and fares reasonably well, in fact supposedly around double the performance of paid search.

The Economist Intelligence Unit made a glaring omission in leaving 'Search Engine Optimisation' out of the ROI question, it's a terrible mistake because many 'senior marketers' often refer to 'Search Engine Optimisation' as a catch all term for a variety of  search engine marketing methods including paid search and contextual etc.  This means that Google has just sponsored a report saying that search overall doesn't work very well and that places email as the easiest to measure and best for ROI, which is contrary to every experience I've had.

Quite interesting is the response to "In two years’ time, how do you expect your company’s spending on online advertising and promotion to be apportioned among these activities?" whereby the marketers indicated that they'd be spending double on Search Engine Optimisation than they would on Paid Search Advertising, again probably not the answer Google would have wanted to hear or I suppose what the managers actually meant.

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        Economist Intelligence Units - Future of Marketing
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