The report from Ad Age published recently, reveals some eye-popping facts and figures about search marketing. You can read the complete report in PDF titled searchfactpack2007.pdf here.

There are a couple of interesting findings that the report brings to light:

For as much as 88.5% of the time people don't pay attention to PPC adverts, which means that the maximum click through rate can never be above 11.5% (assuming the best possible scenario, when all of them click on those ads). This fact highlights the need for a well-designed and well-executed SEO campaigns by companies for them to reach out to a majority of all those browsing the Internet.

Marketing folks have shifted focus in a big measure from outbound marketing (print and direct mail) to inbound marketing strategies. This can be concluded from the fact that the budget spend on inbound tactics has been growing. Statistically there is a 16% shift in spending from direct mail and a 20% shift from print advertising to search marketing.

As far as PPC ad campaigns undertaken by marketing firms are concerned, majority (65% of the firms) don't manage more than 500 keywords for various campaigns. Further, a big number of these companies have a very narrow range of keywords which they make use of.

A staggering number of searches are performed in the US each second, any guesses? It's 2,500 searches/sec. In the month of August last year, the number of searches performed and recorded in the US stood at 9.82 billion.

On the nature of search queries performed, out of all the keywords and phrases searched about 31% contain 4 or a greater number of words, while about 33% searches entail unique and long search phrases.

Is it possible to talk about Internet search and search marketing and not mention Google? Well Google's really big. Just yesterday we talked about how much data it processes each day. See: Google: Processing 20 Terabytes Per Day and Counting!. As far as the figures uncovered by the search marketing report go, in 2006 The big daddy of search Mr. Google hired 5,000 people, hence doubling their manpower. The revenue per employee for Google stands at $950,000!