“Any damn fool can put on a deal, but it takes genius, faith and perseverance to create a brand.” (David Ogilvy)

Search engine marketing (SEM) is usually measured along direct-response lines - conversions, purchases, signups, outcomes, page views, and so on. But a new school of thought is emerging - that branding and SEM are not mutually exclusive.

Branding work is cool. Its intangible makes it difficult to measure campaign success, it requires deep strategic thinking, budgets tend to be larger, and there’s no responsibility to directly drive sales. People involved in branding rarely consider SEM as an option.

Maybe they should:
- 41% of users gain awareness from online search results (DoubleClick, 2005)
- 27% of respondents are more likely to name a brand if it’s in the top spot on Google (IAB, 2006)
- Top listings have a significant upward lift on branding metrics, particularly with unaided awareness (IAB/Nielsen NetRatings, 2006)
- 60% of 3,000 respondents’ brand opinions were changed or enhanced as a result of searching (Dieringer Resource Group, 2005)

Proof that effective SEM builds brand. For those of you who still judge your campaigns by return on investment (ROI) metrics, it may be time to judge campaign effectiveness by different metrics.

The recent leak of AOL’s search data onto the Web (more info here, here and here) has prompted questions on the security of searching the Internet. Basically, AOL this month released a file containing 20 million searches by over 650,000 AOL Search users over a 3-month period. This data was intended for research purposes, but a New York Times article uncovered one of the searches. Many users were performing “ego searches” - searching for their own name - that made it easy to identify them. Heads rolled at AOL as users went into uproar mode over privacy concerns, and the data was quickly deleted. But not, of course, before lots of other sites downloaded the data and mirrored it all over the Web. There are some really interesting findings.

Almost half of all searches are in vain - 47% of searches result in no clicks on any results. This supports evidence that users tend to refine their searches by adding more keywords or by putting a country or area name at the end of the search. Thus, “digital camera” morphs into “4 megapixel digital camera dublin ireland”.

Unsurprisingly, when a user does click on a search result, he/she is 90% likely to click on a first-page result, and the top five results get three-quarters of all clicks:
- 42% of clicks are on the #1 result
- 12% of clicks are on the #2 result
- 8% of clicks are on the #3 result
- 6% of clicks are on the #4 result
- 5% of clicks are on the #5 result

If anything, this shows just how important the number 1 spot is for your keyphrases. The drop-off from 42% to 12% for second place is huge. Number 1 is still the holy grail for search engine marketers