A flurry of paid-search reports released Tuesday may have marketers’ heads spinning, but each provides insights into specific parts of the process.

SearchIgnite released the Q2 2010 U.S. Search Market Report Tuesday. Year-over-year paid-search spend increased 14% in the U.S., following an 11% YoY increase, sequentially.

Similar to Efficient Frontier’s report, SearchIgnite found retailers spent more — about 7% — compared with the prior year. Microsoft’s search engine Bing gained market share by 26% from the year-ago quarter, but declined 9.6% sequentially. Overall, Bing dropped slightly to 6.2% share of search spend in the U.S., while Google and Yahoo reached 78.4% and 15.4%, respectively.

Google increased the average number of paid-search ads shown per search session by 15%, followed by Yahoo at 22% and Bing at 11%. More premium ads in sponsored listings and down the right rail don’t necessarily suggest good news, however. Increasing ad coverage can diminish returns, and result in a poor experience for consumers, according to the report.

Relying on Google for metrics, the report suggests that consumers can withstand between 5.5 and 6.0 ads per search query. Yahoo now serves up 6.85, making it unlikely the increase in ads will lead to additional revenue. Bing serves up about 3.85 ads per keyword, so it’s “extremely” likely that this will reflect in better-than-expected revenues for the search engine. Similarly, Google went from 4.97 to 5.72, so they could report healthy increases as well.

Google now monetizes nearly 8% more of their keyword searches. Stokes says keywords searched with no ads decreased from 43.6% in Q1 to 39.7% in June, making the inventory easier to monetize.

In the Americas, paid-search spending by tech companies increased 12% during the second quarter, while the Asia/Pacific region rose 33%, sequentially. Combined, spending in Europe, the Middle East and Africa grew 25%. Google’s China strategy and move to serve content from Hong Kong has influenced performance. During the second quarter, Google’s share in the region dropped from 69% to 61%, while Baidu’s share of paid-search spending rose to 22% from 12%, sequentially. Read more at www.mediapost.com

In a survey of shoppers in four states, nearly four in 10 told cross-channel commerce solutions provider CrossView they preferred to receive promotional messages from retailers by email. It was the most popular communications channel, with direct mail drawing about a quarter of respondents and text messaging coming in third with 18%. Just 9% of shoppers were interested in promotional messages on social media.

See more at www.emarketer.com

Email marketers searching for subject lines that will grab their recipients’ attention should look to highly relevant, time-based messages for the best results, according to data from Experian Cheetahmail.

The email marketing services company conducted a study of more than 40,000 messages in March 2010 and discovered that, overall, almost half of transactions and about three-quarters of opens and clicks happen within a day of receiving a marketing email. So good results will often come fast.

One of the fastest ways to get email recipients to open and click on messages is to send notices of abandoned carts. As Sara Ezrin, senior director of strategic services at Cheetahmail, explained to eMarketer, recipients of such messages are already thinking about the items in their cart, and that they are in the market for those products will spur them toward quick response.

See more at www.emarketer.com

Companies in retail, travel and auto industries dug into budgets during the second quarter in 2010 to spend 24% more on paid-search ads overall, compared with the prior year, and 9.7% sequentially, according to the Efficient Frontier Q2 2010 Executive Summary released Tuesday.

See more at www.mediapost.com

CHART OF THE DAY: Craigslist’s Traffic Crashes Into eBay

Citi analyst Mark Mahaney put out a massive report on Internet stocks today, and this chart showing eBay’s tanking traffic jumped out at us. Mahaney says, “these long-term very negative traffic trends point to the possibility of sustained eBay U.S. Marketplace underperformance going forward.”

See more at www.businessinsider.com

Very Effective SEO Objectives by Primary Market

See more at www.marketingsherpa.com

Many social media marketers are eager to tie a hard number to the value of their efforts. To that end, firms have attempted to analyze the worth of fans and followers on social networking sites like Facebook.

Digital consulting firm Syncapse and research company Hotspex have come up with an empirical formula that puts an average value of $136.38 on the Facebook fans of the site’s 20 biggest corporate brands. Most of that value comes from how much the fans will spend on the brand’s products, with additional dollars coming from customer loyalty, recommendations and earned media.

The study found that people spent significantly more on products they were fans of, compared with consumers who were not fans. In the case of many of Facebook’s most popular food and beverage marketers, fan spending was more than double that of non-fans.

The pattern of increased fan spending held across all of the top 20 brands on Facebook, with differences ranging from 51% for Oreo fans to 168% for fans of Nokia. Read more at www.emarketer.com

The proportion of online retailers with mobile-tailored sites has tripled in the last year but still remains small, according to a new study. In its second annual mobile commerce audit, digital strategy firm Acquity Group found that 12% of the top 500 Internet retailers had sites optimized for mobile phones, up from 4% a year ago. And despite all the buzz around mobile apps, the share of companies with downloadable mobile apps is only 7%, up from 2% last year. Only 5% had both a mobilized site and an app and only 2% had an e-commerce-enabled app. In terms of specific devices, 11% had apps for the iPhone — up from 1% last year — but few had ones geared to other smartphone platforms such as Android, Palm or the BlackBerry. Only 12% of retailers had mobile sites that allowed customers to complete a transaction through checkout on at least one type of smartphone, and only 2% offered apps with check-out capability. Read more at www.mediapost.com

Coupon codes can make or a break a sale. More than half of the consumers who used a coupon code during their last online purchase said that if they had not received the discount, they would not have bought the item(s).

When asked how much they spent on their most recent online purchase, consumers who used a coupon spend almost twice as much as consumers who did not use a coupon.

When asked about their overall shopping experience, satisfaction was higher for consumers who used a coupon than for those who did not.

Consumers who used a coupon said they are more likely to buy from the retailer again when compared to those who did not use a coupon.

See more at blog.compete.com

CHART OF THE DAY: iPad Is On Track To Be The Fastest Selling Mobile Device Ever

After less than 80 days on the market, Apple has sold 3 million iPads and according to Morgan Stanley analyst Katy Huberty, it’s on track to be the fastest selling mobile device in history.

See more at www.businessinsider.com

“Digital and mobile media will be a big focus this year,” he said, noting that 39% of users of Cars.com accessed mobile devices from dealership lots. “Since one in two phones today are smartphones, our biggest challenge, at least in this area, is how to communicate with consumers on mobile platforms.”Read more at www.mediapost.com

The last couple months have brought a wave of data suggesting that a substantial proportion of online social network members use their profiles to engage with brands in some way — including recommending or criticizing a product or service to other people, and engaging with the brand itself for customer service issues. In addition to confirming many of these earlier findings, the latest study, sponsored by Performics and performed by ROI Research, also found that a good number of social net users want more online offers and information from brands.

The survey of 3,000 U.S. social network users found that 40% use social sites to connect with brands and products, including 37% who said they learned about a new product or service from a social networking site; zeroing in on specific social networks, 32% of Twitter users said they re-tweet content provided by a company or product, and 50% of Facebook users click on Facebook ads to “like” a brand. 90% of Facebook users said at least some of the companies or products they’re fans of have done a good job providing relevant content, and one out of three said most or all of the companies or products were doing a good job. Meanwhile 32% of respondents said they have used social networks to recommend a product or service to friends.

Furthermore, there appears to be significant demand for more content and engagement with brands via online social networks. The same survey found 49% wanted more downloadable coupons, 46% wanted more notifications of sales and special deals, and 35% wanted more information about new products from companies or products on Facebook. Read more at www.mediapost.com

Mobile Shopping Doubles in 2010

PriceGrabber found some of the barriers to further mobile buying were inherent to the medium, with respondents complaining that mobile screens were too small and saying that they simply preferred using a PC because it was easier. About one-third of respondents also said the mobile buying process takes too long, and one-quarter indicated transactions were too difficult to complete. Read more at www.emarketer.com

CHART OF THE DAY: Apple Races To Catch Microsoft’s Profits

When Apple’s market cap surged past Microsoft’s last week, Steve Ballmer told reporters, “I will make more profits and certainly there is no technology company in the planet which is as profitable as we are.”

See more at www.businessinsider.com

27.0% report more than 50% of their online sales are attributable to search engine marketing: Percent of Online Sales Attributable to Search Engine Marketing   % by Type of Retailer Percent of Sales All Chain Catalog Web  Manufacturer 5% or less 17.0% 16.7 27.3 16.2 11.1 6-10 9.0 25.0 0.0 8.8 0.0 11-15 11.0 16.7 9.1 10.3 11.1 16-20 7.0 8.3 0.0 7.4 11.1 21-25 9.0 8.3 9.1 8.8 11.1 26-30 8.0 0.0 36.4 2.9 22.2 31-40 9.0 8.3 9.1 8.8 11.1 41-50 3.0 8.3 0.0 2.9 0.0 > 50% 27.0 8.3 9.1 33.8 22.2 Source: Internet Retailer, May 2010 Google dominates the search engine landscape. Yahoo has been the perennial second-place finisher. Bing, has been making inroads since its launch in June 2009, and gaining increasing attention from retail marketers. 19.4% of respondents to the Internet Retailer survey say more than 90% of their search engine traffic comes from Google: ·      43.9% say 71% to 90%, ·      25.5% report 50% to 70% ·      11.2% report less than 50% Read more at www.mediapost.com

According to Internet Retailer’s recent search engine marketing survey of 102 web-only retailers, chain retailers, catalogers and consumer brand manufacturers, 28.0% of merchants report more than 25% of their site traffic stems from paid search advertisements, while 51.5% say more than a quarter of their traffic comes from natural search. Search engine marketing is one of Internet retailing’s fundamentals, says the report. Web merchants keep pouring money into advertising on search results pages and on search engine optimization projects to move up in natural search results.

In the past year: ·      44.9% of merchants report that the conversion rate on pay-per-click search advertising went up ·      16.3% say it went down ·      38.8% say their conversion rate held steady ·      47% report more than 25% of their web sales stem from search engine marketing ·      44.6% increased their paid search budgets ·      49% say they will increase it in the year ahead Shar VanBoskirk, Vice President and principal analyst at Forrester Research, says “Everything we see from the retail side indicates… considerable interest and investment in search related to… driving more online sales.” 37.7% of respondents spent more than 50% of their online marketing budget, 11.9% spent 61% to 75%, and 20.8% spent more than 75%, according to the Internet Retailer survey of IRNewsLink e-newsletter readers conducted with e-mail marketing and survey firm Vovici Corp. Read more at www.mediapost.com

Criticism of behaviorally targeted ads by consumers, privacy advocates and the government has led to uncertainty in the market, which eMarketer expects to reach nearly $1.13 billion this year. Research from the Network Advertising Initiative (NAI) indicates the high value of those ads, for both marketers and publishers.

The study, which looked at ads run on member networks during 2009, showed that among users who clicked on a behaviorally targeted ad, 6.8% converted. That compared with only 2.8% of those who clicked on a run-of-network ad. Clickers found behavioral ads more relevant, but the NAI did not study how likely they were to click in the first place, a key component of effectiveness.

CPM rates were likewise significantly higher for behaviorally targeted ads, with the average price of a behaviorally targeted ad 2.68 times greater than that of a run-of-network ad. Retargeting also provided higher CPMs.

See more at www.emarketer.com

Retailers that want to connect with their target audience online would do well to go where their customers already are. And according to the “2010 Social Media Report” from ForeSee Results, 69% of online shoppers regularly use social media sites.

The overwhelming winner in terms of shopper presence was Facebook, with more than one-half of respondents using it regularly. YouTube took the second spot, with former giant MySpace far behind its rival. Only about one in 10 online shoppers surveyed used Twitter.

See more at www.emarketer.com

See more at www.emarketer.com

See more at www.webpronews.com