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.

AdMob Network hits 2 Billion Requests a Day – Google Mobile Ads Blog.

But, also, just being reported by eMarketer, The Web Passes Newspapers in Ad Spending For First Time – The eMarketer Blog.

Total newspaper ad revenues from print and online ads are expected to hit $25.7 billion this year, still shy of the $25.8 billion advertisers will spend on internet ads.

“Marketers are devoting bigger shares of their budgets to digital media as they see more customers shifting time toward the web,” said Geoff Ramsey, CEO of eMarketer. “It’s something we’ve seen coming for a long time, but this is a tipping point.”

With Google “owning” 65.8% of the market (in this article) and Microsoft controlling 27.1% (this includes Bing & Yahoo), should marketers spend SEM dollars with Microsoft?

The quick answer is “YES.”

However, that comes with some caveats …  If, for example, your site gets the majority of it’s organic search traffic from Google, that is where you need to spend the majority of your SEM budget, that is where your users are located.  There is nothing wrong with just saying “NO” to a big brand like Microsoft/Yahoo/Bing …, however, if you do say, “NO,” make sure you know why you’re doing it, and, keep a close eye on your metrics to see if you get an “uptick” from organic results or a “downtick” once you stop advertising, it may be worth a small spend, for brand awareness reasons, to stay on those engines.

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.

Let me set-up the situation, we have been discussing some of the problems with Social Network Marketing here internally and wanted to start doing some data gathering, independent of big research firms. We wanted anecdotal evidence for our clients. We didn’t have a big budget to run ads, send email solicitations, etc. What we did have, however, is a good survey tool (provided by Survs.com), and the social networks themselves. We built a quick survey, (to get some initial findings, more short surveys will follow), and then posted to Twitter, LinkedIn, our Facebook page, and a couple of local business sites (like OCMetro). Within five minutes of posting about the survey we were beginning to get results.

This illustrates the point that when you’re talking to people that are engaged in your subject matter, and don’t ask them too many questions, you’ll get good results. The same thing can be done with product owners, VIP club members, etc. Even without an incentive to take the survey we got a 97% completion rate!

Not only did we get a successful survey, but, overall site traffic and awareness went up as shown by these stats:
Unique Site Visits (vs. prior week): +107%
Absolute Unique Visitors (vs. prior week): +92%
Pageviews (vs. prior week): +86%
Increase in Twitter followers (vs. prior week): +350%

In addition, traffic came from completely different sources than normal:
Search (organic & paid): -70.46% (vs. prior week))
Referral: +141.67% (vs. prior week)

If the referral traffic it came from the expected sources based on our efforts:
Facebook: 16.67%
Our Blog: 13.33%
Twitter: 8.33%
LinkedIn: 1.67%
Other: 1.67%

Now, enough about the positive effect of the survey, let’s look at the survey results:

How Many Social Networks Are You Using?

Most respondents (>80%) are using between 1 and 6 social networks. There were no respondents that were unaware of social networking, or un-connected; this isn’t surprising, however, given our solicitation methods.

Do You Read All Of Your “Friends” Updates?

In an unsurprising outcome, more than 60% of our respondents do not read all of their friend’s updates, stay tuned for our next survey where we ask the question, “Why Not?”

Tell Us About Those Updates

The last question was interesting, it asked what people thought of the updates from their friends. Over half (>54%) of those surveyed said that the updates kept them perfectly informed, or, lead to interesting places or information online. Only 18% said that they were too much information, and another 27% replied with “Other.” Of those “other” responses, here is one that was intriguing, “Updates can be interesting but many are worthless attempts at attention.” Most of the “other” responses were a combination of the other answers.

We would like to thank you for your participation in the survey, and remind you to stay tuned for more.

Ad dollars are leaving print… and fast!

Their Q1 losses for 2009 were worse than expected, around a 27% loss in advertising revenue. This outpaced their efforts to cut costs (not surprising, good journalism is expensive).

Seth Godin, on his blog, is predicting that by 2012 there will be, “no significant newspapers printed on newsprint in the US.”

WOW! and entire vertical market will be gone, or almost gone in less than three years!

These are both interesting reads and worth the effort to see what’s coming for online advertising.

We have seen with with our clients, and in our past, efforts to cut “traditional” media spending and emphasize online strategies. We’re helping our client get better results through email and PPC marketing; things that are measurable and quickly executable.