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.”

Another article about what we did with Roy’s

Go, read, yes we did it…

Here are some of the big takeaways:

• The three biggest usage spikes tend to occur on weekdays at 11:00 a.m., 3:00 p.m. and 8:00 p.m. ET.
• The biggest spike occurs at 3:00 p.m. ET on weekdays.
• Weekday usage is pretty steady, however Wednesday at 3:00 pm ET is consistently the busiest period.
• Fans are less active on Sunday compared to all other days of the week.

and

Ultimately, the goal for brands on Facebook is to be able to engage with their customers or potential customers and to promote a message. Last month, we looked at a study that broke down how users interact with brands on Facebook.

Yes, social media is here, and big brands are adopting it… and yes, they’re using all sorts of methods to gain “friends/followers.”  Check out the article, at AdWeek for the details.

• BP spent $3.6MM in June alone
• AT&T, the #1 advertiser in June spent $8.1MM
• The majority of their “direct-billed” advertisers spend between $10K and $100K per month

I encourage you to take a look at the article, it has some very interesting insights.

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.