Search Engine Effectiveness

Ever wonder if search engines are an effective online marketing tool. Well, based on a recent report by MediaPost, a survey by Outsell notes 71 percent stated they feel Google search ads are effective as compared to 62 percent for Yahoo and 49 percent for MSN (Microsoft just can't win in this new medium!). Very impressive trends indeed - considering the number of both online and offline media choices available today.

One must ask though, what factors are pushing these respondents to consider the search engines effective. Was it a hunch? An increase in revenue? I assume it was a combination of a few factors but most likely no hard-lined statistics to determine the "true" effectiveness.

Enter now, Google Analytics! Now we can transform that hunch into an informed decision. With analytics you have the ability to measure the effectiveness of an individual search engine including organic and paid activity along with individual keyword performance. This is critical as search engines are typically the leading source of referral traffic to websites and understanding the effectiveness of each one can have a large impact on the success of your site.

In the next post we'll dive into some Analytics and look at different key performance indicators that can measure search engine effectiveness.