Recent research has revealed that online retailers are starting to increase their expenditure on search engine marketing.

Conducted by Internet Retailer, the survey found that 49 per cent of firms questioned are increasing their spend on pay-per-click advertising. This comes at a time when search engines appear to be more selective about placing adverts.

However, the study revealed that e-retailers are now looking at a broader range of search engines. Although Google is still bringing in at least 71 per cent of search traffic for nearly 65 per cent of respondents, its return on investment is not as high as that of its competitors.

Bing, for example, accounts for substantially less traffic. In fact, 56 per cent of respondents claimed that the Microsoft platform accounts for less than 10 per cent of their search engine traffic, while 38 per cent receive between 11 per cent and 30 per cent of traffic from Bing. But when it comes to return on investment, adverts placed with Bing saw a 10 per cent increase in ROI in the year to the first quarter. Adverts placed with Google, on the other hand, saw ROI decrease by 12 per cent, according to figures from Efficient Frontier.

Partly as a result of these changing financial patterns, marketing appears to be shifting gradually over to Bing. The Internet Retailer survey found that more than two thirds of respondents are shifting their finances over to Bing, although less than 16 per cent say they will move more than a fifth of their spending to the Microsoft engine, suggesting there is still an air of caution about the situation.

Companies are also looking into search programmes, implementing longer keyword phrases and improving their copy. Testing different versions of landing pages and monitoring competitors were some of the other tactics employed to improve search marketing.

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