Foreword

Search engine marketing is one of the fastest growing segments of online advertising, with U.S. Bancorp Piper Jaffray's Safa Rashtchy forecasting online search becoming a $7 billion industry worldwide by 2007. Unfortunately, search marketers historically have had to rely heavily on tribal knowledge and trial and error to create successful campaigns. That is all about to change. Bill and Mike have parted the veil of secrecy and written an excellent book that teaches current and future search marketers how to successfully design, implement, and track a search engine marketing campaign.

When I started my first search marketing campaign at Intel, I would have given almost anything for a book like this that explained the process of creating a search marketing campaign. I went to the Search Engine Strategies conferences put on by Jupitermedia and talked to a number of agencies, but I had a hard time getting the information I needed to run an in-house campaign. There were quite a few agencies that would have loved to run my campaigns for me, but no one was willing (or able) to share the intricate details that are necessary to run an in-house campaign. I could easily get details about the generic benefits of search marketing, but how did they apply to Intel? How could I measure success for an awareness campaign when everyone else was talking about e-Commerce? Most importantly, how could I put a proposal together that would show to Intel decisionmakers the benefits of search marketing when all the other marketers at Intel and our agencies were focused on traditional media? If I had this book then, my life would have been a lot easier, and our initial forays into search marketing campaigns would have been a lot more successful than they were.

One of the chapters I am most excited about is the chapter on selling a search marketing proposal to the right people. You can pay an agency to build your keyword lists, write your creative, and even optimize your entire site, but without an approved proposal, you will not have the budget to even consider a pilot program. Bill and Mike walk you through the entire process from calculating the business value and assembling a search marketing proposal, through selling the proposal to stakeholders, and finally selling the proposal to your executives. The book demonstrates a thorough and well-documented process that will help you get the budget you need to test and see whether search marketing is the right vehicle to communicate with your customers.

This book deserves a place in the library of every search marketer, whether they are in an agency or are trying to run a search marketing campaign in-house. I will definitely be adding it to my library and will strongly recommend it to all I know who are involved with search marketing.

Martin Laetsch
Manager, Worldwide Search
Intel Corporation

The views expressed here are the views of the individual, and not the views of Intel Corporation.