The worst may be over for the search engine marketing sector. While significant drops in spending have occurred on a year-over-year basis, a new statement from Efficient Frontier indicates that the rate of decline has just about leveled off. There’ve also been silver linings insofar as ROIs and Bing are concerned.
According to the U.S. Search Engine Performance Report, “Efficient Frontier’s data shows that the rate of decline in total spend year-over-year (YOY) lessened over the past two quarters. Furthermore, spend remained relatively stable both on a quarter-over-quarter (QOQ) and month-over-month basis.”
This might be enough to cause some sighs of relief; the current situation is something to which many people and companies have been able to adapt. But returns on investment are on the rise, as well, as the above graph shows; it seems that search corporations have worked out how to run things more efficiently.
So businesses that have stuck by their search engine marketing efforts have probably done pretty well, and advertisers are likely to throw much more money at the sector as the economy allows them to resume spending at traditional levels.
Finally, Efficient Frontier singled out Bing for its performance in several areas. “Live Search previously lost market share for two consecutive quarters, Q4 2008 and Q1 2009,” the report noted. “Bing picked up click share immediately upon launch and sustained share gains over the course of June.”
Also, according to Efficient Frontier, “Microsoft’s new ‘decision engine’ posted the strongest gains in the travel and financial services categories.”
