Merkle: Black Friday, Cyber Monday sales from Google paid search up by double digits YoY
Phone sales from search ads continue to play a significant role for retailers.
Topic: Mark Ballard
Amazon starts testing Product Listing Ads on Google
For the first time ever, Amazon Product Listing Ads have been popping up in what appears to be an AdWords test.
Shopping Campaign Click And Ad Spend Growth Far Outpaced Text Ads Across Engines In Q3 [Study]
Merkle RKG's Q3 Digital Marketing Report finds clicks share from Shopping campaigns on Bing Ads and Google AdWords on the rise.
Report: Yahoo Search Losing Firefox Users Who “Switchback” To Google
Relying on recently released StatCounter data we previously reported Yahoo search gains in the wake of the Firefox “default search” deal announced earlier this year. However a subsequent analysis by RKG’s Mark Ballard argues that many Firefox 34 users are switching back to Google as their default search engine. Ballard looked at paid clicks from […]
EBay Dumps Google Syndicated Ads For Bing Ads On Mobile Devices
Quietly, eBay has dumped Google AdWords sponsored text ads from mobile devices in favor of Bing Ads. The move was noticed by RKG, the agency’s Director of Research, Mark Ballard, wrote about the change today. EBay serves syndicated text ads at the bottom of category search pages as a way to further monetize its content, […]
RKG Q3: Paid Search Ad Spend Surged 26 Percent Y/Y
Q3 brought more paid search growth among RKG’s clients according to the firm’s third quarter digital marketing report. Paid search ad spend on Google increased 27 percent and Bing increase ad spend rose 24 percent, for an overall growth rate of 26 percent year-over-year. No surprise, mobile devices and product ads continue to drive paid […]
Why Google’s Reported CPC Declines Can’t Tell The Story Of “A Mobile Advertising Problem”
It’s still happening. Google reported on Thursday that the average cost-per-click (CPC) was down again in Q2 from the prior year, marking the eleventh consecutive quarter in which the average CPC fell year-over-year. Some analysts and news outlets have been pointing to this as evidence of Google’s “mobile problem” — the problem Enhanced Campaigns was […]
RKG Report: PLAs Fuel AdWords Growth, Bing Ads Spend Rises Sharply In Q4
RKG has released its Q4 2013 Digital Marketing Report, and as other reports have indicated, paid search saw solid year-over-year growth in the holiday quarter. Paid search spend among RKG’s retail-heavy client set rose 23 percent year-over-year. Overall click volume increased 19 percent, and CPCs ticked up just 3 percent. Google Brand CPCs Fall […]
Google’s Enhanced Campaigns Inspire Love, Hate And Hope For The Next Version
Tensions were high in the pay-per-click world yesterday, as marketers held their collective breath waiting for news of what were rumored to be “big changes” from Google AdWords. Indeed, it was big news — the launch of Enhanced Campaigns, which let marketers combine separate desktop and mobile campaigns into one, with a variety of implications. […]
Researcher: Conduit Toolbar Deal Boosting Bing’s Paid Clicks By 10%
Bing’s traffic acquisition deal with Conduit, the toolbar company that claims to work with 260,000 publishers and 200 million users, appears to be paying off, according to analysis from Rimm Kaufman Group (RKG). Senior research analyst Mark Ballard looked at traffic from Conduit to Rimm Kaufman Group clients from before the toolbar company switched to […]
PPC Data On “Farmer” Shows Traffic Quality Improvement
Some have speculated that Google made the “Farmer” update to help its advertisers, and its own bottom line, but data from large search marketing agencies shows revenue wasn’t the search engine’s primary signal. Yet, data from Efficient Frontier and the Rimm Kaufmann Group indicate that revenue-per-click is showing a modest improvement, all the same. Both […]