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.

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…

• 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.

Well, this is scary.  The Second Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled against Google in a lawsuit (Rescuecom Corp. v. Google Inc.).  The summary of the suit is that if a user searches for a trademarked word (or phrase) then results imply sponsorship:

According to Rescuecom’s allegations, when a Google user launches a search for the term ‘Rescuecom’ because the searcher wishes to purchase Rescuecom’s services, links to websites of its competitors will appear on the searcher’s screen in a manner likely to cause the searcher to believe mistakenly that a competitor’s advertisement (and website link) is sponsored by, endorsed by, approved by, or affiliated with Rescuecom.

MarketingVOX also is linking to more lawsuits that are on the same topic over at SearchEngineLand.

This is what happens when courts, judges, and lawyers who are out of touch with reality decide cases that involve technology that they have never seen or used or understand.  This is patently absurd and the courts need to move into the current century.

A new story out from eMarketer is showing how search marketing dollars are being spent by clients. The data, from Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO) used research from a Radar Research study.

The short version of the article is that of the $13.5 Billion spent in 2008, 88% went to Search Marketing and 11% to SEO. The assertion, however, is that more money will be flowing into SEO programs in 2009 because it delivers longer term results.

DMIdeas caveat… SEO works as long as you spend the big $$ on an infrastructure that eliminates human error.

The other takeaway from the article is that Search Engine Marketing spending will grow rapidly over the next 5 years as shown in this chart:

An interesting, and positive article appeared in The Economist on November 28th about online advertising and how we will be impacted by the faltering economy.

To summarize, although advertising budgets will likely be cut in the coming months/years, there is a good chance that Internet Marketing will be able to defend its usefulness and survive the turmoil.  SEO and other marketing and branding tactics used on the Internet currently allow for actual data to be tracked, and metrics to be provided to a company so that there is justification for where and how the advertising money is spent.  According to the article, “All this makes spending on advertising much less speculative, so that it starts to be treated instead as a cost of sales.”

This is good news for the Interactive Marketing, Search Engine Marketing, and Google Adword agencies out there.  If these forecasters are right, then even in a recession this sector of the economy can still show growth.  As the article points out, we may need to look for different avenues to reach the consumer, such as a focus on social networking sites, but with creativity it should be possible to weather the storm.