Despite steady growth in search engine marketing spending the past two years, it didn’t keep pace with years past. However, the “State of Search Engine Marketing 2010” report, from Econsultancy and the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO), indicates a rise in spending is set to return in 2010.
As search marketers, we’re constantly focusing on page one organic search results for our clients. Appearing in the top ten results for a search on Google brings long-term, cumulative returns. Not so much for rankings after page one.
In the six months since Microsoft launched Bing, the search engines share of the market has inched up from 8 to 9.9 percent, according to comScore. So where’s this uptick coming from?
Google is on a shopping spree with the purchase of Teracent, a startup which sells machine learning technology used to create display ads that are optimized in real-time. It’s the third acquisition for Google this month and comes as Google CEO Eric Schmidt has said the company would increase the pace of its acquisitions.
First and foremost was the announcement that Google has acquired AdMob, one of the largest mobile ad networks, in an all-stock deal valued at $750 million. AdMob currently serves up 10 billion monthly ad requests. Combined with the massive AdSense assets, this will make it the market leader in mobile in a big way.
It’s truly an end of an era. Geocities, the free web hosting service that Yahoo purchased in 1999, has officially been removed from all the major search engines. Millions of pages, millions of neighborhoods, millions of links — poof — have vanished with nary a trace.
Conversions.
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
There’s a study out from Econsultantcy that shows the number one online conversion event for companies is sales, with sign-ups and registrations a close second. Seems obvious, right?
One of the best things about the world of search is that the only constant is change. And so we thought that today we’d identify a few of the changes in two of the search engines out there.
Google acquired DoubleClick for more than $3 billion in March 2008, in hopes of supplementing its lucrative business serving text-based ads alongside search results with the more visual display ads used in corporate branding campaigns — a market dominated by online rivals Yahoo Inc and Time Warner’s AOL.
Google image search. It’s funny how integrated (and popular) it’s become in our daily web habits, yet mostly overlooked in terms of SEO and traffic.
comScore, Inc., a leader in measuring the digital world today released a study of the global search market showing that more than 113 billion searches were conducted in July 2009, representing a 41-percent increase versus year ago. Google Sites attracted significantly more searches than any other engine with 76.7 billion searches conducted, or 67.5 percent market share.
So now we have a new PPC ad format to look into. Video ads in PPC.
Check out this ad by film studio Miramax on a search for “funny movie”. Go search on that or for the title of the film, Extract to try it out for yourself.
McAfee’s annual report on the most dangerous celebrities to search for is out. In other words, searching for a celebrity can be extremely hazardous to your computer these days.
“We have never been a search company.”
Carol Bartz, Yahoo CEO
If the above statement wasn’t true over the last fifteen years, it certainly is now. Yahoo is now committed to the content and ad game, forgoing search to Microsoft. This probably shouldn’t be as big of news as it was. After all, Yahoo used Inktomi search results to help supplement their directory listings way back in the day. And it was only a few years ago that Yahoo search was powered by Google.
Yahoo! and Microsoft announced an agreement that will improve the Web search experience for users and advertisers, and deliver sustained innovation to the industry. In simple terms, Microsoft will now power Yahoo! search while Yahoo! will become the exclusive worldwide relationship sales force for both companies’ premium search advertisers.
Companies cannot assume they do not need to optimize for brand terms simply because they have a short/memorable domain. Whether it is laziness or habit, users are still going to search engines to access well-known brands as opposed to typing a URL into their browsers.
“I have always thought we needed to index the web every second to allow real time search. At first, my team laughed and did not believe me. With Twitter, now they know they have to do it. Not everybody needs sub-second indexing but people are getting pretty excited about realtime.”
Larry Page, Google co-founder
I am often asked about the future of search. I could bandy about terms like latent semantic indexing or talk about the Wolfram Alpha “computational search engine” that was all the hype a few weeks ago. There’s plenty of fodder for discussion around hyper-local search, the effects of personalization/customization, the short-term effects of Bing on Google, et al.
But for me, it always comes back to kickass content.
I thought I’d give an example of a stellar Twitter campaign from a few days ago.
A UK firm named Moonfruit became the most popular company on Twitter through a pretty simple contest. The fact that they moved Michael Jackson down in popularity is pretty staggering.
Recent Comments