According to reports in Internet Retailer, October 2008 pay-per-click advertisers experienced an increase in ad rates by 14%. During this period Google accounted for 77% of search advertising budgets and accounted for about 62% of searches.
At the heart of this growth for Google is the user experience. User’s surveyed saw Google scoring higher in consumer satisfaction, while Yahoo slipped, and Microsoft remained steady.
For search marketing this means that as competition increases on Google AdWords advertisers must have the right strategy to harness the best clicks, and create campaigns focused on driving qualified conversions.
So why has Google continued to increase revenue, the key is in how they have branded themselves and how that translates to the understanding tat they are serving multiple customers: Searchers, Advertisers, Web Site Owners, Content Providers, Consumer protection agencies, Governments. Even as they have added advertising to many of the new acquisitions, such as YouTube, Google has kept consistent with their branding: clean layout and relevant results, both organically and paid. As long as Google continues to improve tracking and targeting features faster than the competition, which is lagging behind, they will remain as the primary platform for most paid search budgets.
Recently Ask.com has relaunched their search engine and returned to their branding, semantic search, answering questions users ask. With a purposeful effort to constantly improve becoming more noticeable over the past six months it may only be a matter of time before Ask starts eating into the search and advertising shares of it’s competitors. The question to be answered is “who’s share of search traffic will ask.com eat into?”
