The growing importance of search engine marketing is leading to new ideas about how internal search teams are structured, reports ClickZ.

No longer is winning the bidding war for an important PPC search term enough. Advanced analytics tools and internal redundancies are leading agencies and in-house teams to make sure things are working smoothly. In some cases different search teams working on different product areas are actually stepping on each others' toes, resulting in less effective ads. Intuit, in one example, actually created a keyword czar to make sure no one internally is working at cross-purposes.

Elyse Thibault from Hearst addressed the issue of defining what success looks like with so many different variables involved. She recommends setting specific benchmarks in each category (downloads, sales, etc.) and judging a campaign's effectiveness based on those goals.

However, simply engaging in conversation on best practices indicates search engine marketing has become a critical mainstream tool.