WebProNews

Report: Paid Search Spend Up 10%

SearchIgnite has released a report, which indicates that paid search spending in the United States was flat year-over-year in the third quarter, yet up 10% quarter-over-quarter. This comes largely from multi-channel retailers, who increased paid search spend by 40% in the quarter, according to the firm. This is despite flat conversion rates and average order value.

Yahoo Adds Paid Search Listings to Filtered Results

Yahoo has given Yahoo Search Marketing advertisers the ability to have their ads shown in filtered searches. When Yahoo launched its new search results pages last month, they added the ability for users to filter results by site. Relevant ads are now appearing with these results.

Geography Not Too Valuable in PPC Bid Management

A study that the Rimm-Kaufman Group began in early August set out to find out if certain regions and specific zip codes play significant roles in paid search conversions. The thinking was that low-population areas with fewer brick and mortar stores are usually more successful for catalogs, so perhaps the same would be true with paid search.

Yahoo Gives Search Marketers Time-Saving Tips

Yahoo has decided to drop some knowledge on Yahoo Search Marketing advertisers about a tool it has that it says will speed up their campaign optimization. If you are not familiar with it, it's called the Bulksheet.

Last Click Attribution Debated At SES San Jose

Warren Buffet may eat a banana right before he buys a yacht, but luxury yacht builders would be making some pretty bad conclusions if they tried to connect the two events.  A session at SES San Jose examined whether or not the practice of last click attribution (which often points to paid search) fails in a similar manner.

Are Local Businesses Trying Hard Enough with Paid Search?

On Friday, the Interactive Advertising Bureau announced that the US had reached $5.5 billion in online ad revenue for the first quarter. This was down a bit from last year, but that's not too bad considering the state of the economy. In fact, you'd be hard pressed to find other ways to advertise your business that are as cost-effective.

Paid Search Tips From Microsoft, Facebook, And Others

Companies that have made it this far should feel hopeful about the future; we may finally be coming out of the recession.  Not everything's back to normal, though - just ask General Motors - and so if you're in the position of needing to justify the use of paid search (or just wanting to get better at it), a session at SMX Advanced aimed to help.

Bing Algorithm and Advertising Questions Answered

Microsoft has posted a FAQ page for adCenter advertisers wondering just what Bing has in store for them. One question pertained to Bing's algorithm, to which Microsoft's Carolyn Miller responded:

FTC Issues Restraining Order Against Yahoo, MSN

On behalf of the Federal Trade Commission, a federal court issued a restraining order against Yahoo, MSN, AllTheWeb, and Altavista to prevent the search engines from allowing mortgage finance scammers to use a government URL in sponsored search results, thus representing themselves as the operator of the site.

Longer Search Queries Hurting PPC Clicks?

Advertisers using paid search may find that they have to adapt to the habits of searchers. And there have been indications that searchers are using longer queries to find what they are looking for these days. comScore shares some rather interesting data showing that the number of paid clicks has grown 3 times slower than the total number of queries in the US since January 2007. Look at these graphs: