I am pleased to announce that the new Forrester Wave: Search Marketing Agencies, Q4 2017 report is now live! This report looked at the 12 most significant search marketing agencies in today’s market.

This year’s Wave evaluation uncovered a market in which four agencies — Performics, Merkle, 360i, and iProspect — emerged as Leaders. Five providers — Wpromote, Rise Interactive, Neo@Ogilvy, Acronym, and iCrossing — are Strong Performers. Catalyst and Mirum are Contenders. And Forward3D is a Challenger.

We developed a comprehensive criteria set in three high-level buckets: current offering, strategy, and market presence. The criteria and their weightings are based on past research and user inquiries. Our study largely looked at how good each agency is at helping their clients create, execute and measure their SEO and paid search programs. This evaluation also considered how marketers will work with and rely on search marketing agencies in the future — so we evaluated the agencies on their experience in optimizing pages and buying ads in non-traditional search engines like Amazon and Pinterest.

If you want to benchmark your current search marketing agency against the agencies in our Wave or are looking for a new agency, this Forrester Wave is the best starting point for you. Your criteria for such a solution may differ, hence I recommend to go beyond the Forrester Wave graphic and:

  • Download the Excel sheet associated with the graphic (Figure 2 in the report).
  • View the detailed evaluations in the scoring guide.
  • Adapt the criteria weightings to fit your needs, so you can see customized rankings of the agencies.

I will be doing a webinar for Forrester clients that will dive deeper into how marketers can select the right agency for them. And if you need Forrester’s help in selecting an agency — for example, through inquiry, advisory, or project consulting work — just reach out.