eMarketer reports today (open access till October 11) on some interesting info about paid search advertising contained in results of an annual survey by Marketing Sherpa.

The upshot: 43% of Sherpa readers feel paid search is “very effective” vs. 34% last year. More than one in five B2C marketers (22%) plan a “big increase” in paid search spending in the next year; more than half the remaining marketers (43%) plan a “small increase.”

All of this comes in light of rising costs and diminishing click rates: The average clickthrough rate of survey respondents fell from 3.0% to 2.6% while the average Google cost per click rose from $1.29 to $1.61. (Sherpa acknowledges these numbers may be skewed “due to the high incidence of readers in the e-commerce/multichannel retail, travel/hospitality and financial services industries.”)

Takeaway for marketers: Click costs have risen, and will continue to do so. The search jungle continues to get more crowded all the time.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 3rd, 2005 at 12:01 am and is filed under Marketing Stuff, Marketing Takeaways.