Sign Up To Receive This Column Via Email:

Relax, The Search Industry Is Doing Just Fine

May 2, 2013 at 9:24am ET by Mark Ballard

For enterprise SEM practitioners looking to set budgets or otherwise anticipate their needs in the space for the months and years ahead, it's been a particularly difficult time to get a read on how the industry is really trending. Conflicting data and opinions abound; new threats to the hegemony of search, real or just perceived, continue to spring up; and, there are times when all of us may wonder just how much the numbers are actually changing and whether we should be concerned. Case in point: comScore recently showed U.S. core searches increasing 11% year-over-year to hit an all-time [...]

Study: U.K. Mobile Search Survey Reveals U.K. Consumers In Less Of A Hurry To Make Purchases Than U.S. Mobile Users

Apr 11, 2013 at 2:27pm ET by Amy Gesenhues

Mobile-location based advertising network xAd joined forces with mobile call measurement provider Telmetrics to release their first U.K. Mobile Path-to-Purchase study, focusing on U.K. mobile search behavior. Conducted by Nielsen, the online study, surveyed 1,500 U.K. smartphone and tablet users to measure consumer search activity on mobile devices. While price comparisons and reviews were the leading mobile research activities in the U.K., users performing restaurant and automotive searches on smartphones were most often looking for location or local contact information. According t [...]

Mobile Growth Highlights Importance Of Comprehensive Local Strategy

Apr 1, 2013 at 11:44am ET by Natalie Wuchenich

This week, the Local Search Association is releasing our “Local Mobile Search Study,” which overviews the evolving mobile environment in the U.S. and the growing role of smartphones, tablets and other connected devices in the local search experience. The 2013 study, which features 2012 data compiled from several comScore digital and mobile metrics databases, demonstrates a significant shift in how consumers are accessing the Internet and emphasizes the importance of local businesses embracing mobile platforms as yet another venue to reach consumers. Rise Of Connected Devices Provides [...]

Report: PPC Tablet Spending Up 112%, Smartphones Up 113%

Mar 28, 2013 at 3:48pm ET by Ginny Marvin

The new IgnitionOne Digital Marketing Report for Q1 finds that overall paid search spend in the U.S. was flat for the quarter, while mobile and tablet growth remained strong. Tablet spending rose 112% and smartphone spending jumped 113%. The study suggests that the growth in tablet and mobile is coming from a reallocation from existing budgets for Desktop/PC ads, rather than net new spend. While the gap is smaller than when the report last looked in Q3 2012, the report found a clear differentiat [...]

CPC Decline Ends: Rising 7% In Q1 Due To Mobile & PLAs [Covario]

Mar 28, 2013 at 2:07pm ET by Ginny Marvin

We may have seen the end of CPC stagnation. Covario's Global Paid Search Spend Analysis for Q1, released today, suggests that the cost-per-click trends of the last six quarters have reversed with CPC prices rising 7% from the previous quarter and 23% year-over-year. Overall paid search spend grew 9% quarter-over-quarter and 33% year-over-year. The following chart shows global paid search activity for Q1 ‘13: Google CPCs Rise 39% Year-Over-Year The study suggests that rising CPCs on Google a [...]

Google Says No To Phone Numbers In PPC Ads, Forcing The Use Of Call Extensions

Mar 22, 2013 at 11:48am ET by Ginny Marvin

You may have missed Google’s quiet and brief announcement that starting in April, AdWords ads with phone numbers in the text will be disapproved. Advertisers who want to display phone numbers will have to use the call extensions feature instead. Google states in the announcement, “We are making this change to foster a safer, more consistent user experience across desktop, tablet, and mobile devices.” As others have stated, what this change really does is allow Google to charge for mobile ad engagements as part of its transition to enhanced campaigns. With call extensions, advertise [...]

Enhanced Campaigns: Product Listing Ads Now On Smartphones

Mar 13, 2013 at 11:02am ET by Ginny Marvin

Google has announced on its Commerce blog that product listing ads (PLAs) are now showing on smartphones in all markets that currently serve PLAs. To be eligble to run on smartphones, product listing ad campaigns must be upgraded to enhanced. Below are two screenshots of how the ads are appearing: [...]

Enhanced Campaigns: Offer Extensions & Location Targeting Explained

Mar 6, 2013 at 5:47pm ET by Ginny Marvin

Google released more details on its Mobile Ads Blog today about offer extensions and location targeting tools available in the new enhanced campaigns. Location Targeting With Better Reporting One of the main features of enhanced campaigns is that advertisers can target multiple locations within one campaign and adjust bids based on a multiple of the default location bid. The reporting tools now make it easier to see what location targets triggered your ads and where your users were when they saw your ads. This is handy. Say you've set your campaign Location Options to the def [...]

The Real Reason Why Google Is Dropping The Tablet vs. Desktop Distinction? It’s The User Context, Stupid!

Feb 28, 2013 at 1:32pm ET by Larry Kim

There’s been some grumbling among PPC marketers over the last few weeks about a few specific changes in Enhanced Campaigns – in particular, the loss of tablet vs. desktop segmentation, which was previously a best practice for mobile advertising strategy. One of my well-respected colleagues put it bluntly: Now, if you’ll forgive my attention-grabbing headline (based on 'It's the Economy, Stupid'), I’m definitely not actually calling anyone stupid – and, you can certainly see by the volume of re-tweets and favorites, it’s clearly a widely-shared view. However, I recently had th [...]

The Big AdWords Update: Enhanced Campaigns Puts The Focus On Mobile

Feb 6, 2013 at 3:00pm ET by Ginny Marvin

“If we were going to build AdWords today, what would it look like?” That’s the question Google’s Nick Fox, VP of Product Management, and his team began asking last year. The result is AdWords enhanced campaigns, a major update announced today that is designed to simplify campaign management across multiple devices, and to increase adoption rates of mobile advertising among small and medium sized businesses. PPC managers have become accustomed to the time-consuming workarounds needed to target ads by device type and location by cloning campaigns and managing granular settings and bid [...]

The Christmas Jump, Tablet Hump & CPC Bump: Recent Trends In Mobile Usage

Jan 31, 2013 at 12:38pm ET by Siddharth Shah

“I grab my tablet and get busy with the pen. Y'all could not be just like me if y'all was my twin.” -Andre 3000 That consumers are rapidly changing the way they interact with advertisers is no secret – but the rapidity in which they are doing so is quite surprising. As I looked into the data from the last retail season three trends stood out. Christmas Day Is The Early Predictor Of Tablet Traffic For The Next Year Tablet impression-share has a distinct pattern. It spikes on the weekends when people are home and drops in the weekdays when people are on desktops in their offices. This [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Paid Search | Search Ads: Mobile Search

Report: PLAs Drove 28% Of Google Non-Brand Ad Clicks In Q4

Jan 16, 2013 at 3:51pm ET by Ginny Marvin

Google Product Listing Ads generated 28% of Google non-brand clicks in Q4 according to RKG's latest Digital Marketing Report released today. PLA CPCs were 26% lower than CPCs for competitive text ads. RKG also found a larger than average gap between bids and actual CPCs for PLAs, suggesting competition is still relatively light. Product Listing Ads are also having a big impact on non-brand Google ROI when compared to Bing. RKG reports, “As Google CPCs have declined overall and compared to Bing, the non-brand ROI for Google now stands 22% higher than that for Bing.” Google Nonbrand Paid [...]

Report: Global Paid Search Spending Up 18% In 2012

Jan 15, 2013 at 8:07am ET by Ginny Marvin

Advertiser spending on paid search rose 18% in 2012 according to Covario’s Global Search Advertising Spend Analysis, which tracks paid search spending in more than 45 countries. That growth trend is down just slightly from the 21% annual increase Covario reported for 2011. In Q4 Google commanded 86.5% of global paid search spend and a whopping 93% of impressions. Advertisers spent 13% more on search spending with Google than they did a year ago. Spending on the Yahoo Bing Network increased 23% over the past year, however spend fell 6% from Q3. Source: Covario Regional Outloo [...]

Last Minute Tips To Use Mobile Search To Ramp-Up Holiday Sales & Beyond

Nov 5, 2012 at 12:53pm ET by Sherwood Stranieri

This holiday shopping season is predicted to the the biggest ever for mobile commerce. A new survey from Deloitte expects that holiday sales from mobile devices will hit $36 billion this year, accounting for 5.1% of the $925 billion online total. Your Holiday To Do List So, if you have a mobile store up and running, you'll want to make sure your mobile store is ready to attract, inform, and convert incoming shoppers. Here are some great tips from past columns that should be part of your to-do list: If you have a responsive design mobile site, you'll want to take a second look at the Tune [...]

iPhone 5 Won’t Change Mobile Search, But Can Nokia?

Sep 24, 2012 at 1:30pm ET by Sherwood Stranieri

With the launch of the iPhone 5, perhaps the most eagerly awaited electronics launch ever, speculation has been rampant on the impact it'll have on the mobile phone market, on Apple's future as an innovator post-Steve Jobs, and on the coolness of the next gadget to get dropped into your pocket. But from a mobile search perspective, iPhone 5 is pretty much more of the same. A more effective version of Siri will be standard in the new phone's iOS 6 - but that was a game changer from the iPhone 4s. iPhone 5 has certainly caused a sales storm, pushing more smartphones into more pockets. B [...]

Report: Tablets Offer Lower CPC, Higher Conversions Than Desktop PCs

Jul 25, 2012 at 10:51am ET by Greg Sterling

One of the key findings of the Q2 2012 Global Digital Advertising Update from Adobe (Efficient Frontier) is that search marketers can get more value from mobile campaigns than they now can on the PC. According to the report cost-per-click (CPC) prices are lower for both tablets and smartphones than comparable PC search campaigns and the ROI is higher in both cases -- although "conversions" are lower on smartphones. Adobe's data are drawn from "over 250 billion impressions and activity of 46 million fans for 225 companies in the automotive, CPG, financial services, media and entertainment, a [...]

Chitika: iPad Leads Tablets With Web Usage But Only Has A 1.02% CTR On Ads

Jul 9, 2012 at 9:30am ET by Barry Schwartz

Chitika published a study today on tablet device usage share and the click through rate (CTR) on ads based on screen size. The study showed that 8 inch tablets such as Vizio and Pantech had the highest level of click through rates but the lowest level of web usage rates. Similarly, the 8.9 inch tablets such as Samsung Galaxy Tab 8.9 and the Archos 9 had the second highest click through rates with the second lowest rate of Web usage rates. Apple's iPad is the leader on click through rate when it comes to measuring a single tablet device despite size. The iPad lead the 9.7" tablet [...]

DataPop CEO: Mobile Paid Search Traffic Is 50 Percent Or More In Some Categories

May 1, 2012 at 11:21am ET by Greg Sterling

I had a chance recently to speak to DataPop CEO Jason Lehmbeck. Before DataPop Lehmbeck was at Overture/Yahoo. DataPop is an agency/platform that specializes in "offer driven" search campaigns. I was talking to Lehmbeck about mobile search trends and what kinds of consumer response he was seeing to various campaigns. Lehmbeck gave me some unpublished, internal data that I'm now sharing in this post. He said that mobile paid search "looks like much like search advertising did in 2001." 15 to 25 Percent Mobile Paid Search Traffic Between 15 percent and 25 percent of paid search traffic is n [...]

App Search Engine Appolicious Introduces “AdWords For Apps”

Mar 27, 2012 at 5:59pm ET by Greg Sterling

Appolicious, an independent apps marketplace and search engine, has introduced "AdWords for Apps": a new PPC advertising system for app developers and publishers. The company says it's the largest independent apps engine and market. Chomp, which was recently acquired by Apple, was its primary competitor (other than iTunes and Google Play). Between iOS and Android there are more than 900,000 apps. App discovery is now a major problem for both consumers and developers -- hence the new advertising option on Appolicious. Chomp was planning to introduce a similar capability and then was boug [...]

Building Mobile Landing Pages That Succeed In Mobile Search

Mar 26, 2012 at 12:06pm ET by Sherwood Stranieri

Inertia is always a problem when you're starting something new. The start seems like a very tall wall, and we often make that wall taller by imposing a lot of requirements and parameters on what needs to be done. Mobile marketing must seem that way to a lot of companies, and as a result, far too many of them are sitting on the sidelines. Fortunately, there are a few vendors out there offering a shortcut to the mobile Web: a turnkey publishing platform that allows a marketer to quickly deploy mobile landing pages. The question is: how effective are these pages in the context of mobile s [...]

Get Our News, Everywhere!

Follow @sengineland

Got a tip? Tell us here!

Most Likes
Most Tweets
Comments

Our Stories Being Liked on Facebook

Search Engine Land Sponsors

Advertise With Us

Free Daily Search News Recap!

SearchCap is a once-per-day newsletter update - sign up below and get the news delivered to you!

Click to watch SMX conference video

Join us at an upcoming SMX event:

North America

SMX Advanced - June 11-12, 2013
SMX East - Oct. 1-3, 2013
SMX Social Media Marketing - Nov. 20-21, 2013
SMX West - March 11-13, 2014

EMEA

SMX Paris - June 6-7, 2013
SMX Stockholm - Oct. 14-15, 2013
SMX Milan - Nov. 7-8, 2013
SMX Israel - Jan. 2014
SMX Munich - March 25-26, 2014
SMX London - May 2014

APAC

SMX Sydney - April 2014

Search Engine Land produces SMX, the Search Marketing Expo conference series. SMX events deliver the most comprehensive educational and networking experiences - whether you're just starting in search marketing or you're a seasoned expert.