In an acknowledgment of how relevance in search advertising has been so successful, Microsoft moved to give higher quality ranked ads a better shot at appearing.

Concerns that have hammered the mortgage lending market and its ad budgets won’t trickle down to Google, or what lenders spend on Internet advertising.

Click-through rates could be so much better for your site if you only…well, keep reading to see what some sharp industry pros had to say with their Paid Search Tips.

Google’s advertisers should be a little happier with the ability to compete for top placement in AdWords, thanks to a tweak to the formula for calculating who grabs the top spot.

The New York Post’s been a bit down on giving Google money for paid search lately. It may not be surprising to you that the NYP might be a little one-sided on this issue, even unnecessarily snarky, but there is, at least, an interesting concept presented: buying sites with good natural rankings to avoid AdWords altogether.

Steve Lobo, Senior Manager Search Marketing at eBay gave an informative talk on paid search at the eBay Live conference in Boston.

E-commerce sites are heavy users of search engine marketing; with each of the top ten search engine marketers being retail or comparison-shopping sites according to comScore qSearch Market report.

In March, close to 20 billion sponsored links were offered to U.S. Internet users from the top search engines. eBay was the top search engine marketer with 802 million sponsored link exposures.

A recent WebTrends survey of 132 search marketers at the Emetrics Summit found that 81 percent had paid search campaigns on Google.

U.S. Internet users did 75. 8 percent of their January 2007 searches on Google or Yahoo, according to comScore media, and Nielsen//NetRatings found the combined total to be 76.4 percent.

People searching for information and an understanding of the events surrounding the shootings on Virginia Tech’s campus hit online news sites in droves.

E-consultancy has published a free 12- page briefing on the Paid Search industry in the UK.

The document is packed full of useful information, including:

New tools at Microsoft’s adCenter allow people to forecast keyword impression counts and demographics, and to detect location details from a search query.

The Geographic Detection tool works in a straightforward manner. Submit a query with a prominent destination like a business or lankmark, and it can provide additional details

Anything Yahoo can do, Microsoft already did. In Microsoft’s opinion, they are doing it a lot better than Yahoo and think the portal will just keep on playing catchup when Panama arrives to take on adCenter.

It’s no secret to those of us who deal with paid search every day that managing campaigns can be a handful.

Click fraud, a term that describes when a paid search ad is clicked on by someone other than an interested consumer (e.g., a third-party who profits from the click because they get a percentage of the ad revenue), is the 1000 lb gorilla in the jungle that is paid search. How’s that for a metaphor?

ClickZ summarizes a new WebSideStory summary that looked at the conversion rate of paid search compared with organic search.

This post is a companion to our recent post titled, SEO skills that translate to paid search. Our theory as that the two disciplines are not that different, although there certainly are some distinctions between the skills we use for paid search versus SEO.

Sometimes it may seem that natural search engine optimization (SEO) and paid search marketing are two entirely different animals.

You may notice a new icon while cruising the Google search results this summer. Once again, Google will be testing a Click-to-Call feature.