MarketingSherpa’s Search Marketing Benchmark Guide for 2009 has been released, which provides an interesting collection of data that can be used a reference when determining what role Search Marketing needs to play in an organization.

To organize the 300+ charts and survey results, The Guide covers 5 major areas outlined below:

  1. Budgeting and Search
  2. Tactics of Search
  3. Search Providers Explored
  4. Measuring and Testing
  5. Search Benchmarks
Useful takeaways from the guide:
  1. Budgeting for Search requires strategic planning
  2. Search Advertising affects Your Brand ( Favorably)
  3. More marketers have adopted analytics (Google Analytics leads the way
Survey Results to consider for 2009:
  1. Conversion and ROI rank as the top two most under-used metrics for Search Marketing
  2. Search is a medium that affects the perception of your Brand
  3. The majority of marketers "under-budget" for Search and fail to realize their goals
Read and download the full Executive Summary here