Marketing Research Chart: PPC objectives in the next 12 months

by Kaci Bower, Senior Research Analyst

Marketing Research Chart: Increasing Web traffic and lead generation top the list for PPC objectives

Click here to see a larger, printable version of this chart

In MarketingSherpa’s 2012 Search Marketing Benchmark Report – PPC Edition, marketers cited generating leads and ROI as the top two challenges for search marketers. Their solution to these challenges? Traffic. PPC can be a great traffic generator, and 63% of organizations are planning their campaigns around this objective.

Despite the many moving levers in PPC, and the attention and understanding required to successfully execute better tactics, less than one in four organizations plan to develop a strategy for their PPC programs.

Achieving or increasing measurable ROI is important to half of the organizations surveyed. Measuring true ROI is difficult for many because of issues with their CRM systems’ abilities to record and track.

Despite this -- or perhaps because of the difficulty involved -- less than 20% of organizations are planning efforts around integrating their search marketing data into a single dashboard or with their CRM systems.

The survey also discovered increasing lead generation is the most important PPC objective for B2B organizations. Given the longer sales cycles -- including steps to generate, qualify, score, nurture and hand off leads -- marketers know they have to maintain an adequate inflow of leads to keep their funnels full.

Since B2B websites are not transactional in nature, “increasing online sales revenue” is demoted in terms of its importance as an objective for this channel, but only for this channel. Over 70% of organizations with consumer sales channels cite this as their top objective for their PPC programs over the next 12 months.

For additional research data and insights about PPC, download and read the free Executive Summary from MarketingSherpa’s 2012 Search Marketing Benchmark Report – PPC Edition.

Useful links related to this chart

PPC Marketing: A look at analytic and monitoring tools

PPC Campaign: Marketer learns from unsuccessful campaign to deliver 75% increase in sales

PPC Advertising: 5 winning display ad tactics that increased paying customers by 2,900% and dropped cost-per-lead 37%

2012 Search Marketing Benchmark Report – PPC Edition