The RKGBlog blog posted a screen shot of Bing testing search ads directly in the organic results. Honestly, I almost cannot believe it - but more on that later. Here is a cropped picture of the screen shot. Why is this so shocking? Placing search ads inline with organic free listings is somewhat taboo for search companies. Years ago, search engines had "paid inclusion" programs which guaranteed content to be indexed, but they had no ranking factors. In fact, Yahoo after much controversy dropped their paid inclusion program in 2009. But to allow advertisers to inject ads wi [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Microsoft: Bing | Microsoft: Bing Ads | Search Ads: General | Top News

Search ad spending among tech and electronics companies is way up so far in 2011, so much so that Q1 spending surpassed Q4 levels for the first time. That's the word from Covario's Global Search Advertising Spend Analysis, which tracks about $400 million in annual spending around the world. Covario says Q1 spending was up 6% over the traditionally heavier Q4 period, and up 26% over Q1 of 2010. The huge year-over-year increase is mainly due to how weak spending was in Q1 2010. Much of the growth is coming outside the US: Spending in both the Asia-Pacific and Europe-Middle East region [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Search Ads: General | Search Marketing: General | Stats: Spend Projections

Interesting new data about searcher behavior from a recent User Centric eye-tracking study: Whether using Google or Bing, all 24 participants looked at the organic search results for their queries, but between 70% and 80% ignored the paid ads on the right side of the page. User Centric studied the search behavior of 24 "experienced users" of both Google and Bing, all between 18 and 54 years old. They were asked to do eight searches -- four on Google (with Google Instant turned off) and the other four on Bing. The results? Here's a table version of the diagram above. Google [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Search Ads: General | Search Marketing: General | Stats: Search Behavior | Top News

Once campaigns reach a certain size, successful paid search marketing becomes less about generating traffic and more about identifying and driving the highest value visitors. At the same time, however, scale makes creative testing and ad group refinement difficult to implement across hundreds of thousands or even millions of keywords. In a high-volume world, actively managing negatives is possibly the single most impactful opportunity you have for increasing conversions and decreasing costs. Keyword building is a continuous process for both positive and negative keywords. If you have not [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Industrial Strength | Search Ads: General | Search Marketing: General

The Yahoo-Bing paid search partnership has produced a couple positive trends for advertisers, according to new data shared by search marketing agency Efficient Frontier. As a preview to its usual quarterly overview, Efficient Frontier has published some early data on its blog with some findings about the Yahoo-Bing transition. The company says that the transition led to small drops in click share and spend share, and a larger drop in overall paid search ad impressions for Yahoo-Bing. But, the flip side of that was a gain in revenue-per-click (RPC). Efficient Frontier says revenue-per [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Microsoft: Bing | Search Ads: General | Stats: General | Yahoo: Search Ads

The dust seems to have finally settled on the long holiday weekend, and according to several reports both formal and informal, that dust is largely colored green. Green, as in money: transactions, average order size, revenue, and other metrics are widely reported as being up this year compared to 2009. Here's a recap of several reports related to paid search ads, online holiday shopping, and so forth. Kenshoo: Budgets, Transactions, Revenues Up Kenshoo, a provider of digital marketing software that's used by five of the top 10 US retailers, says search advertising boomed during the month [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Features: General | Search Ads: General | Search Marketing: Shopping Search Marketing | Stats: comScore | Stats: Hitwise | Stats: Search Behavior

Reading search marketing advice, you will find an abundance of information about best-practices that are easy to apply to a campaign or ad group level. Common best practices such as keeping ad-groups small and targeted, with relevant and keyword specific ad-copy have demonstrated great results. Moreover, the value of managing match types and negatives to control or avoid poorly targeted impressions can’t be stressed enough. However, as anybody who has managed a large-scale search program understands, knowing the best practices is only part of the equation. To be truly effective, yo [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Industrial Strength | Search Ads: General

This morning the IAB announced online ad revenues for the first half of 2010. According to the report, revenues increased 11.3 percent vs. the same period a year ago. Second quarter ad revenues were $6.2 billion, a 4.1 percent increase over last year. Total 2010 ad revenues to date (through June) were $12.1 billion. Search continued to be the single largest category of online advertising, with 47 percent of all online revenues: Most categories, however, were unchanged from last year. It's worth noting that search is double the next largest category: static display. However, all di [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Google: AdWords | Search Ads: General | Stats: General | Stats: Size

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-o [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Google: AdWords | Microsoft: Bing Ads | Search Ads: General | Stats: Spend Projections | Top News | Yahoo: Search Ads

Ad impressions and ad clicks are rising steadily on Bing, while remaining flat or declining on both Google and Yahoo. That's according to the latest quarterly report (available tomorrow) from search marketing agency Efficient Frontier. The report, which covers Q2 of 2010, also offers positive news about the overall growth and recovery of search advertising in general. Efficient Frontier says ad impressions on Bing are up 56% compared to Q2 of 2009, while impressions on both Google and Yahoo have declined slightly compared to one year ago. Ad clicks on Bing are also up substantially f [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Google: AdWords | Microsoft: Bing | Search Ads: General | Stats: Spend Projections | Top News | Yahoo: Search Ads

A battle appears to be brewing over the promise of monetizing Twitter and, more specifically, over the placement of ads on the Twitter platform. NOTE: See our follow-up post to this article, FAQ: Twitter’s New Rules On Third-Party Ads In a lengthy blog post today, Twitter's Chief Operating Officer, Dick Costolo, announced that the company will not allow third parties to place ads in the Twitter stream -- something that Twitter's own Promoted Tweets already does. It is critical that the core experience of real-time introductions and information is protected for the user and with an eye to [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Search Ads: General | Search Engines: Real Time Search | Twitter

Search engine marketing -- both pay-per-click and SEO -- remains a strong source of traffic and sales for retailers. That's according to an Internet Retailer survey conducted in April of 102 web-only retailers, chain retailers, catalogers and consumer brand manufacturers. According to the survey, 27% of respondents say that search engine marketing is responsible for more than half of their online sales. (See chart at left.) 47% say that more than a quarter of their web sales stem from search engine marketing. That includes both PPC- and SEO-driven sales. As far as traffic is concerned, [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Search Ads: General | Search Marketing: Branding | SEM Industry: Stats | Stats: General | Stats: Spend Projections

TweetUp, the new AdWords-like ad platform for Twitter has added a prime, new publishing partner: the popular Twitter client, TweetDeck. In an email to early TweetUp members, founder Bill Gross explains how TweetUp's sponsored listings will be integrated in TweetDeck: TweetDeck will feature a separate search column for TweetUp results, where users can see continually updated results showing the best tweeters on topics of interest. The email also says that TechCrunch will test ways to distribute TweetUp ads, "including a TweetUp search field, roll-over pop-ups tied to key words in their [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Search Ads: General | Search Engines: Real Time Search

Twitter's rumored Promoted Tweets are now official, launching only a day after the very similar TweetUp launched (will that be DOA?). Promoted Tweets has two phases, which might be described as an AdWords phase and an AdSense phase. The AdWords part is what is launching first. Marketers buy keywords (for now on a CPM basis) and their ads show up at the top of Twitter searches as sponsored tweets. It's paid search. And I can see the future SMX Advanced panel now: "Best Practices for Twitter Search Campaigns." Apparently Twitter has "huge" search volume, according to COO Dick Costolo, tho [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Search Ads: Contextual | Search Ads: General | Top News | Twitter

Hot on the heels of the TweetUp announcement comes news that Twitter plans to announce its own advertising platform on Tuesday. The New York Times says the program will be called "Promoted Tweets." The advertising program, which Twitter calls Promoted Tweets, will show up when Twitter users search for keywords that the advertisers have bought to link to their ads. Later, Twitter plans to show promoted posts in the stream of Twitter posts, based on how relevant they might be to a particular user. Several companies will run ads, including Best Buy, Virgin America, Starbucks and Bravo. AdAge [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Search Ads: General | Search Engines: Real Time Search | Twitter

Echoing recent stats that show Bing slowly growing its search engine market share, a new report says Bing is also increasing its share of search ad spending and clicks. The news comes from the latest quarterly report written by Efficient Frontier, a search marketing agency that manages more than $900 million in digital spending annually. The Efficient Frontier report says Bing's click share rose to 5.5%, and its spend share rose to 6.5% in Q1 2010, a 45% increase in both from Q1 2009. Travel was very strong for Bing with 9.1% of spend share, up 160% from a year ago. As the charts abo [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Google: AdWords | Microsoft: Bing | Search Ads: General | Stats: Spend Projections | Top News | Yahoo: Search Ads

Bill Gross, who all but created paid search in the late 1990s when he founded GoTo.com, has launched TweetUp, an advertising ecosystem that does for Twitter search what AdWords (and other paid search platforms) does for web search. It's not officially tied to Twitter, and will compete with Twitter's expected ad platform (whenever it launches). Twitter users -- individuals and companies -- can bid on keywords and have their profile or individual tweets show up in Tweetup's sponsored listings when someone performs a Twitter search. Advertisers will initially pay on a cost-per-impression basis [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Search Ads: General | Search Engines: Real Time Search | Top News | Twitter

Recession? Economic slowdown? Financial gloom-and-doom? Not online, and not as far as Internet advertising is concerned. The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) says that U.S. online ad revenue hit an all-time high of $6.3 billion in Q4 of 2009, a 2.6% increase over the fourth quarter of 2008 and a 14% increase over Q3 of 2009. My overdramatic opening sentence aside, the economic downturn obviously did impact online advertising last year: The IAB says U.S. ad revenues for all of 2009 dropped 3.4% from 2008 to $22.7 billion. Search and display ads continue to be the strongest ad formats, [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Search Ads: General | Search Ads: Video | Search Marketing: General | Stats: General

Just in time for this year's mid-term Congressional elections in November the US Supreme Court opened the financial floodgates by overturning campaign finance rules that prevented corporations from spending at will to oppose or support political candidates. Two of the biggest likely beneficiaries of these new more liberal (not in the political sense) spending rules will undoubtedly be Google and Facebook, although they stood to benefit regardless as more and more political ad dollars flow into search and online display. According to The Hill both Google and Facebook are preparing for what t [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Facebook | Google: AdWords | Search Ads: General | Top News

Yesterday there were three press releases from three search platforms, two aimed partly or substantially at the local market, that are incorporating the Facebook Ads API into their platform capabilities: Marin Software, Clickable and Kenshoo. Here are excerpts from the three releases: Marin Software: Marin Search Marketer will provide marketers with the tools necessary to manage large-scale advertising programs through Facebook Ads. By marrying impression, click, and cost data with conversion and revenue data, Marin Search Marketer will provide a complete view of campaign ROI and effec [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Search Ads: General | Search Marketing: Branding | Search Marketing: General | Search Marketing: Local Search Marketing