Marketers increased the amount spent on U.S. search campaigns between October and December 2010 — especially retailers — compared with the year-ago quarter. Spend rose 35.5% overall and 36.6% in retail, according to the SearchIgnite Q4 2010 U.S. Search Market Report released Tuesday.

This is really good news for marketers and agencies in the space, clients are beginning to understand the need for search and marketers are finally able to compete for ad dollars against traditional media. This is thanks, in part, to innovations by the search engine providers on mobile and targeting technologies.

The price of keywords fluctuated depending on the search engine. In Q4 overall, the CPC on Google rose 9%, whereas combined Yahoo and Bing came in flat. Demand for a word or a phrase drives up the price of keywords or terms. Using branded keywords can sometimes help marketers control costs. Brand owners will typically pay the least for their branded terms. One of several reasons this holds true is because consumers are three times more likely to click and convert on the terms, so Google makes its money more easily.

The article attempts to make a strong argument for search spend on Yahoo-Bing as well as Google, however, we will continue to advise our clients against that strategy until a significant amount of their organic traffic is coming from those engines.

Read the whole article here.

Of the $368 billion marketers plan to spend this year, 32.5% will go toward digital; 30.3% to print. Digital spending includes e-mail, video advertising, display ads and search marketing. “It’s a watershed moment,” says the study’s lead author, Outsell vice president Chuck Richard.

This is great news for digital agencies, and firms like Google who are the recipients of these online ad spending dollars. Keep in mind, however, that the majority of this revenue goes to the large ad vendor. Agencies keep only from 5-10% of the total spend.

Are you already paying for postcards or other mailers? What if we could do your direct mail, PLUS our exponentially better email marketing program as well – for the SAME PRICE you’re paying now?

Interested?

Stay tuned, our new toolkit, DM² for marketers will be launching in July 2009!

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