Sales and marketing divisions are being hacked to pieces in the current economic climate. The old saying goes that in an economic downturn it is perfect time to invest in marketing, as most are pulling money out of non-essential expenditure so the price of marketing is driven down. However not many main players are following this philosophy, leaving widespread unemployment with the sales and marketing industries.

Describing marketing as non-essential expenditure is slightly misleading. Many companies have had to throw out their financial projections for the next couple of years on which their business models were based. This includes marketing expenditure which is merely based on projected sales and budgeted for accordingly. It is this lack of transparency of return on investment that has caused a non-essential labelling for many marketing ventures.

People say that money talks. This is certainly the case with marketing and one area which has seen unprecedented growth and widespread investment is search engine marketing. Many of the household name brands are revaluating their marketing investment and seeking higher levels of return on investment for their money. Search engine marketing provides a transparent return on investment and many of the big players are recognising this.

The age of digital technology means that everything leaves a data trail. For example, digital television can provide detailed reports of what people watch on TV, so viewing figures are more accurate and specific figures can be obtained to show how many viewers watched an advertisement. Those figures are improved on previous viewing statistics from analogue TV, but the crucial data is how the viewers acted upon the information they received in the advertisement.

Within the medium of television there are a couple of techniques that can be used to measure this, such as offering incentives to take part in a questionnaire or setting up a .tv website as a landing page to measure those who saw the advertisement and have taken action because of it. However in this case companies are again spending vast amounts of money driving consumers to their websites from other marketing mediums when the majority of users will go through search engines.

A massive amount of internet users would go through search engines, even for the simplest searches. For example, if a viewer saw the aforementioned TV ad then the chances are that they would not type the url directly into the address bar of their browser. They would probably open their search engine of choice and type the company name into it, which would lead them to the main site as opposed to the landing page.

Hence many consumers, even after seeing marketing from other mediums will look for a company through a search engine. All statistics support this and companies are catching on, turning search engine marketing into the fastest growing marketing medium. Online all user activity is traceable, so every click is measurable. By understanding where all traffic is coming from, marketers have the essential knowledge of what keyword driven traffic is earning money.

This allows for every pound of marketing budget to be measured against traffic and revenue. The advanced nature of analytic tools provides measurability at every level of search engine marketing and this is why most companies are starting to investing in some level of paid or organic search engine marketing.