Some interesting stats from Google

At the B2B London conference the other day I sat in on a presentation from the Head of B2B vertical Markets, Google UK, Mr Russ Cohn.

In telling their story they presented lots of numbers of search and online marketing and usage.

Below are some of the more interesting numbers.

Forrester Research (sorry I don't have the year) reported that for Europe, the change in media consumption was as follows:
Magazines: - 36%
Newspapers: -12%
TV: -21%
Internet: +40%

In the UK, PricewaterhouseCoopers reported that online advertising spend was up 79.8%.

Piper Jaffray reported that for 2004, average costs per return for advertising across various mediums was as follows:
Search: £0.45
Email: £0.55
Yellow Pages: £1.18
Banner ads: £2.00

The key takeaways were:

• ROI is important. You need to measure your ROI in order to know how much you spend.
• Ads must be relevant. Irrelevant ads fail. It is surprising how many people don't get this.
  
• Test and re-test. By refining the various elements of your campaign based on careful analysis of the ROI you are increasing the chances of success for your adwords campaign.

In a Q&A session following, one audience member asked if he should target keywords such as competitors names. Apart from a vague "no" from the Google reps there wasn't much said on it But aside from any legal implications such actions might bring in terms of trademark infringement, it says this organisation doesn't have a very strong message if they need to ride on the coat tails of their competitors.

It really does annoy me to see organisations practising such things. Good marketing isn't hard. You need to learn it, but that is the main thing. Otherwise it is time consuming. You can't be lazy and be a successful marketeer.