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ClickZ reports about a new study by Marketing Sherpa that is truly impressive. Pay-Per-Click (PPC), Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay-Per-Call are showing dramatic rises in usage and effectiveness. This was a large study with 3,271 marketers responding.

As the study indicated, SEO spending increased 177 percent over the last 12 months. The story reports that among both B2B and B2C marketers, there were impressive gains in effectiveness for SEO, PPC and Pay-Per Call campaigns. Pay-Per-Call had the largest 12-month gain with 43 percent of marketers rating their campaigns as “very effective.”

Other items of note:

• B2C marketers in the study were now allocating 56 percent of their annual marketing budgets to online.
• B2B marketers in the study were spending 40 percent of their annual marketing budgets online.
• SEO campaigns that were engineered by interactive marketing firms showed an increase in site traffic of 110 percent while in-house directed SEO campaigns registered an increase in site traffic of 38 percent
• Only 7% of the 3000+ respondents rated click-fraud as a problem.
• Advanced online marketers indicated that campaigns are most effective when they move beyond merely placement and instead advance to conversions metrics, web analytics, split testing and front-to-back ROI data analysis.

As this BusinessWeek Online article points out, company boards and top management are demanding demonstrable return on marketing expenditures. Apparently, more and more firms are turning to online resources to help meet this mandate.