What does click fraud mean to Email Marketing?

I’ve got an unpopular belief that paid search has peaked.   Increasing competition for keywords is driving conversions down and acquisition costs up.    Add in click fraud and you can almost smell where this is heading.

Keyword buys over the past 4 years had a big role in building ExactTarget into the national leader we are now,   but paid search is now the fastest shrinking marketing budget item in our company.

We are all getting better at natural search, and that’s where people are more inclined to click anyway.

So what’s this mean for email?   Plenty.    Acquisition is the toughest thing in any business.   As bringing new customers in becomes even tougher a more intense light is being focused on the value of customer retention as well as the proper management of those ever-more-precious leads.

This trend continues to reinforce that data-driven email is the single most important tool in a marketers arsenal.