Google The ‘Early Winner’ In Ads After Bing-Yahoo Integration

In the aftermath of Bing and Yahoo integrating their search ad platforms, the “early winner” seems to be Google, whose share of paid search spending rose more than two percent between the second and third quarters of this year. That’s one of the conclusions in the latest quarterly report from Efficient Frontier, a search marketing agency that manages more than $900 million in annual digital spending.

The company says that Google’s share of paid search spending rose from 75.8% in Q2 2010 to 77.9% in Q3 2010. Paid clicks at Google are also up 9% year-over-year, cost-per-click is up 14% year-over-year, and impressions are up 6% year-over-year, according to the report.

Bing is also seeing increases in spend share and clicks, but Efficient Frontier says there’s “a lot of noise” in the data due to the Bing-Yahoo integration.

Clearly, as a result of the transition, Bing is picking up clicks and spend at a strong rate. However, at this point it is hard to isolate natural Bing gains from forced shifts of Yahoo! traffic.

The report says ad spending overall was strong in the third quarter, with search spend up 19% year-over-year. Efficient Frontier expects overall search spending to continue growing into Q4, and expects Google will benefit the most because the focus on retail-based advertising is in its favor.

The company also says there was “noteworthy” demand for Facebook advertising in the third quarter, a trend that’s expected to continue going forward.