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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Top Search Engines by Share of Visits April vs. May 2010 |
| Very Effective SEO Objectives by Primary Market |
CHART OF THE DAY: Mobile Search Is Exploding, But Ad Revenue Is Tiny |
According to RBC Capital, mobile searches will quadruple in the next three years. During that same period, desktop searches will continue to increase, suggesting mobile searches will not cannibalize desktop searches. |
The bad news: Despite the growth in mobile search, the ad market will remain rather small for Google. RBC estimates the mobile search ad market will only reach $2-$3 billion in the next few years. |
SUMMARY: Competition between companies and their affiliates is natural. Affiliates can be very effective at creating revenue-generating traffic through search so there’s an inherent tension in the system. See the main attitudes/policies with which merchants attempt to deal with this issue. |
********AS ALWAYS, if you’re interested in any brief, please follow the link to the full article…the full chart appears as well. *******
Here is a short list of highlights and findings from the report: - As mentioned above, search traffic increased by 13.7% with an optimized display campaign running. - A third-party display campaign ran in contrast to our own campaign in a separate period, and CPCs and CTR metrics reached all-time lows during this period. - Search visits decreased by -30.8% when the optimized display campaign was not running (again, keep in mind that this gap may be partially attributed to the change in the economy over the time period surveyed). - Daily unique visitors to the subject site increased by 2.5% in the second period, with an optimized display campaign running. - Online users who viewed the display ads likely remembered the client’s brand after seeing the display ads, which translated to higher clicks and recognition when performing a search. - With the optimized display campaign running, paid search click-throughs increased 14.87%, and costs-per-click decreased by 11.22%. - ROI also increased with the optimized display campaign running. Read more at www.mediapost.com |
| More US adults use the internet than they use doctors for obtaining health and medical information. |
| Consumers are much more likely to begin their quest for health information with a search engine rather going directly to a website. |
| Consumers who visit product sites are nearly three times more likely than the average US adult to request prescriptions by name from their doctors. |
| When consumers use search engines for pharmaceutical or health information online, they are most likely to search by the name of a specific condition/disease or the name of a specific product. |
Several comScore studies have confirmed that online campaigns drive offline sales, according to Fulgoni. In the first study, comScore took four categories, 53 brands and 200 of the most trafficked sites. The company looked at people exposed to display advertising and what they did in the month following. Findings reveal that 18% searched on the brand advertised and 29% went to the advertisers’ sites. Consumers
who were exposed to the display advertising spent 55% more time than the average visitors to these sites the next month. The rise in time spent is matched by a similar increase in page views — about 51%. |
Then, comScore analyzed the impact that online campaigns have on retail sales by matching the name and the address of consumers to retail loyalty card databases. The supermarket Kroger, for example, has issued about 60 million loyalty cards, which provide a massive data set to understand the degree that online search and display campaigns drive retail sales. The findings suggest a lift that is five times stronger when people are exposed to search ads alone, compared with display. Search alone produces an 82% lift, compared with display at 16%, and 119% when search and display are combined. About 82% of online ad campaigns measured by comScore have generated an average lift of 22% in CPG brand sales in retail stores. Read more at www.mediapost.com |
A McAfee report analysed the risk from searching for more than 2,600 of the most popular keywords in 2008, looking at the maximum percentage of risky sites a user could encounter on a single page of search results. |
Worldwide, it found that the riskiest term was “screensavers”, with six out of 10 search results containing malware, while the keyword “lyrics” had a risk factor of one in two. |
Searchers clicking on the word “free” had a 21.3 per cent chance of encountering an infected website, which suggested that hackers were targeting users who were looking to budget and save money. |
In Britain, the riskiest term was “bebo”, with 33.3 per cent risk, followed by “friv” - a popular flash game site - at 22.2 per cent, and “hotmail” at 20 per cent. |
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