A recent WebTrends survey of 132 search marketers at the Emetrics Summit found that 81 percent had paid search campaigns on Google.

Another 64 percent ran campaigns on Yahoo, 49 percent on MSN, 18 percent on Ask.com and 12 percent had campaigns on other search engines.

The majority of respondents said they used 10,000 or fewer keywords in their paid search campaigns, with 22 percent saying they ran 1,000 to 10,000 keywords and 31 percent using one to 1,000 keywords.

 As for evaluating their campaigns, search marketers said they used a variety of metrics.

"Traffic" was used by 44 percent of respondents. More than a third of respondents used "conversion," and "revenue" while "cost per action" was used by 22 percent of respondents. Just 14 percent of marketers measured "profit" to find out how well their campaigns were working.

Respondents also said they used a number of search marketing analyst tools at the same time to gauge performance. Around 31 percent used Web analytics, while close to 20 percent used Microsoft Excel and 18 percent used bid management solutions.

Paid Search Keywords