After coming back strong in Q1, US paid search spending continued to regain strength as 2010 went on.

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

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Very Effective SEO Objectives by Primary Market

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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.

See more at www.businessinsider.com

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.

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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.

The most common situation for which they use a search engine for this purpose is when they have symptoms for a condition. Read more at www.marketingcharts.com

At Re:think 2009, the 55th annual convention of the Advertising Research Foundation, Angela O’Connell, head of cross media research at Google Europe, and Lucas Hulsebos, media research director at MetrixLab, presented research validating what many of us have postulated for years: search can build brand lift. In particular, dramatic brand lift occurs after the click. I doubt that U.S. and European customers behave differently with regard to search and brand lift, but even if they do, the results are so positive that it would require a different species to invalidate the research.

Even after giving respondents a four-day gap between exposure to search and completing the survey to see the long-term effect of the medium, there was still a great deal of lift from the search component, particularly when there was click-through and engagement with the marketer’s site.

The results in lift are significant and, because PPC search marketers pay only for the click, the lift in branding due to the sponsored link is free. The huge branding metric lift as a result of visits is powerful and should be taken into account when the overall campaign objectives include branding.

The study also defined effectiveness and efficiency. Effectiveness combined the branding effect, multiplied by reach; efficiency was effectiveness divided by the spend for that media. By dividing by spending, the efficiency number was normalized to reflect the efficiency per exposed person, regardless of the size of the media buy.

Search indexes at 1,049 vs. TV’s 100. Sure, you reach fewer people with search, but when you reach consumers and they click through, you’ve very efficiently raised their brand perceptions. The study stated that: “Search is 10x more efficient than TV and 3.5x more efficient than radio in raising Top of Mind Awareness.” Read more at www.clickz.com

Web users are mission minded. Cramped for attention. Bent on standards. And uninterested in learning new navigation methods.

That means when someone arrives at your website, blog or article, they should know immediately what to expect. Everything–even your microcontent–should be simple, succinct and scannable.

Most people will find your website through a search engine. That’s where you have to start. From the beginning.

This is how you need to think. You need to think like a searcher.

This means you need to avoid cleverly ambiguous headlines. Subtitles that don’t push the ball forward. Cutesy sentences.

What you have to remember is that people don’t go to the web to window shop.

They go there to drive 60 miles per hour—and look at billboards. Read more at www.copyblogger.com

Recession-Proof Interactive Marketing

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Microsoft, the software giant flush with billions of dollars in its warchest, has agreed to buy Silicon Valley semantic search engine Powerset, we’ve learned.

The purchase price is rumored to be slightly more than $100 million. An announcement is expected next month.

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Google’s (GOOG) share of the U.S. search market increased to 68.29% in May from 67.9% in April and 65.13% a year ago, according to market research firm Hitwise. Meawhile, Yahoo’s (YHOO) share fell to 19.95% from 20.28% a month ago and 20.89% a year ago. Microsoft (MSFT) didn’t fare much better. Market share for its search service fell to 5.89%, from 6.26% in April and 7.61% a year ago.

Despite their best efforts, Microsoft, Yahoo and Ask.com just can’t seem to narrow, even slightly, Google’s massive lead in online search.

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Google lets sites customize search

Google is giving webmasters the chance to customize their own search features, essentially letting them control what users find when they search within a webpage.

The New York Times reports that Google Site Search Service, an update to Google’s Custom Search Business Edition, lets businesses tailor search results so users find content within a website that wouldn’t appear in a normal Google search.

Site Search is an alternative to Google’s existing Search Appliance, which lets sites maintain and host their own search services. Site Search is hosted on Google’s network of computers and does not require any software or in-house upkeep. Recent Microsoft acquisition FAST provides a similar service, but requires businesses to install and supervise search software in-house.

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Google is to the PC (utilitarian) as searchme is to the MAC (elegant).

At least, that’s what an impressive group of VC’s that just plunked down another $12.6 Million on searchme are hoping you’ll think.

Including previous investment, this brings the total capital they have netted to date, to $43.6 Million (or about $28.25 Million Euros *sigh*). Investors include Sequoia Capital, DAG Ventures, Deepfork Capital and Lehvan Brothers Venture Capital.

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Driving traffic - and ultimately sales - from local search is an opportunity for marketers who know the tactics, techniques, and players unique to this rapidly growing, specialized internet marketing field. The goal of 1-in-5 searches is to find something locally, according to Yahoo!’s research.

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