The search engine marketing trade association SEMPO finally published its survey results yesterday evening, showing that the search market will have spent about $4 billion for 2004, up 39 percent from 2003's levels. That includes paid search marketing as well as agency fees and in-house costs for placement, management, search engine optimization and other services. Breaking down those figures, about $3 billion is to be spent on paid search, $618 million to in-house management of search marketing, $380 million to outside search management agencies and $30 million to licensing for search technologies. Sliced another way, $3.3 billion will be spent on paid placements, including in-house and out-of-house management fees. $492 million will go against organic search engine optimization, $182 million to paid inclusion and $72 million to search-related technology.

Survey takers reported seeing an average click price rise of 26 percent over the last year, but claimed it would take a further 33 percent rise in price before the return on investment turned negative. Interestingly, the smaller firms, which were more apt to measure their campaigns very closely, found that they could go up a full 61 percent before seeing losses. More…

A minority of the advertisers reported that the budgets were new marketing moneys, with 59 percent saying that the search spending came from stealing from paid shopping directories, email marketing, web display advertising and print budgets.

Brand awareness proved the top advertising objective, narrowly beating out sales and lead generation. Exactly half said that senior executives thought the search efforts were "high priority," although only about a third said that among companies with more than 500 employees.

A slight majority of advertisers said they would conduct all of their search efforts completely in-house. They said 28 percent of paid placement spending would be outsourced and 29 percent of organic search engine optimization. Larger advertisers were more likely to outsource.

A summary of the research can be seen on the SEMPO site.