Search marketing traffic and performance models

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is the practice of manipulating and/or paying the search engines (Google, Yahoo!, Bing, etc.) to drive traffic to websites. The SEM community has developed techniques that can channel visitors to websites; however, little work has been done to develop models able to estimate the amount of traffic generated by SEM. In this paper, we develop formulae that can be used to estimate traffic resulting from SEM campaigns that can be used by search marketing agencies for competition analysis and by web hosting providers for performance analysis and capacity planning. Our experimental results show that our models work best for targeted marketing campaigns, but the formulae presented can be generalized to broader marketing domains.