CHART OF THE DAY: How Long Until Facebook Passes Google In Traffic? |
Google Slightly Loses Explicit Core Search Share
Google Sites led the US explicit core search market (which measures user engagement with a search service with the intent to retrieve search results) in July 2010 with 65.8% market share, down 0.4 percentage points from June 2010, followed by Yahoo Sites with 17.1% (up 0.4 percentage points) and Microsoft sites with 11%. Ask network captured 3.8% of explicit core searches, followed by AOL LLC with 2.3%. Read more at www.marketingcharts.com |
| 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 |
According to SearchIgnite, year-over-year paid search spending was up 14% in Q2, compared with a gain of 11% in Q1. Spending was down slightly, by 2%, quarter-to-quarter—considered a normal part of the summer slowdown in marketing activity.
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Time spent on Yahoo sites hit a new U.S. low in June, according to traffic data released by comScore today. Citi analyst Mark Mahaney compiled the data in a report today and produced the chart below. |
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. |
Yahoo, Microsoft Make Slight Gains
Google Sites led the US core search market in June with 62.6% of the searches conducted (down 1.1 percentage points from May), followed by Yahoo Sites (up 0.6 percentage points to 18.9%), and Microsoft Sites (up 0.6 percentage points to 12.7%). |
CHART OF THE DAY: Microsoft’s Head Of Sales Blames Facebook For Low Online Ad Prices |
Social networks, with their massive inventory of page views, have much lower ad rates on a cost per thousand impressions (CPM) basis than the Internet at large. ComScore reports that Facebook and MySpace only get a $0.56 CPM on average, while the Internet at large gets $2.43. |
SUMMARY: Recent search engine innovations have changed the SEO landscape as we know it. What impact will personalized, real time, mobile and video search have on an organization’s SEO campaigns in the next 1–5 years?
In this week’s chart, you’ll learn which innovations are expected to have the greatest impact. |
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