WebProNews

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. Google has built several fortunes on the strength of its effective contextual advertising program. It's so strong that the company believes mortgage lenders, among the biggest spenders in online advertising, will cling to paid search as long as they can.

Google's Jon Kaplan said in a Reuters report that the search ad will remain a fixture in the budgets of the mortgage lending market:

Advertising based on Web search allows marketers to tout their services to people when they look for information and track the response to such commercial messages. As a result, it remains a key outlet for mortgage lenders to cultivate new business leads, Kaplan said.

Google's biggest mortgage industry advertisers spent on average $3.5 million apiece on search ads in the first quarter, compared with $1.9 million in the year earlier period.

Another Google executive said in the report the spending by lenders continues unabated:

"Every single day that somebody is looking for a mortgage ... these campaigns from these financial customers are on 24-7, 365 days a year," said Tim Armstrong, president of Google's advertising division in North America. "So our ecosystem actually mimics what the GDP looks like."