While many companies exclusively position their campaigns with Google, utilizing the organization’s popular Adwords software, many businesses are also noticing the potential of other search engine advertising platforms such as Bing. Bing has steadily increased its market share in this area for many years and is fast becoming a force to be reckoned with. As such, the PPC team at MarketTarget has announced its intention to offer Bing PPC management options from early 2012 alongside its current wide range of paid search services.

David Wiedmaier, the SEO agency’s leading Pay Per Click specialist, feels that companies shouldn’t be put off by the fact that Bing is largely unexplored territory for many marketers.

“By investing in the platform sooner rather than later, businesses will be exposing their brand to an expanding audience and are likely to gain an edge over their competitors, as many rival companies may not have tapped into Bing’s potential yet”, explains Wiedmaier.

MarketTarget’s team of experts is quick to stress that companies can cost-effectively run campaigns with Google and Bing simultaneously, no matter what their level of experience with the programs. All businesses approaching MarketTarget for any related PPC management service should be aware that the entire team behind this division of the company is professionally qualified, possessing Google Analytics and Adwords accreditations alongside years of experience of running similar search campaigns.

All marketers interested in Bing Pay Per Click management are invited to get in touch with MarketTarget for more information.

About MarketTarget
Since 2009, MarketTarget has been a leading provider of SEO and Search Engine Marketing services. As a full service San Diego SEO services firm, MarketTarget also offers full service web marketing, SEO consulting services and custom SEO training options for its clients. What makes MarketTarget unique involves several key factors: Personal Service, Reasonable Costs & ROI Focus. MarketTarget offers many great free SEO resources, including SEO white papers and a helpful SEO Newsletter.

Source: www.markettarget.com

The April 2011 qSearch data reflect the impact of Yahoo! Search Direct, Yahoo!’s new feature that delivers search results in real-time while users type their query. Yahoo! Search Direct was available only on Yahoo! U.S. Web Search for the month of April.

U.S. Explicit Core Search – Market Share

Google Sites led the U.S. explicit core search market in April with 65.4 percent market share, followed by Yahoo! Sites with 15.9 percent (up 0.2 percentage points) and Microsoft Sites with 14.1 percent (up 0.2 percentage points). Ask Network accounted for 3.0 percent of explicit core searches, followed by AOL, Inc. with 1.5 percent.

More than 16.2 billion explicit core searches were conducted in April. Google Sites ranked first with 10.7 billion searches, followed by Yahoo! Sites with 2.6 billion, Microsoft Sites with 2.3 billion, Ask Network with 491 million and AOL, Inc. with 248 million.

U.S. Total Core Search Market Share
Google Sites accounted for 64.2 percent of total core search queries conducted (up 0.1 percentage points), followed by Yahoo! Sites with 17.9 percent and Microsoft Sites with 13.8 percent (up 0.2 percentage points). Ask Network comprised 2.7 percent of total search queries, followed by AOL, Inc. with 1.4 percent.

Americans conducted more than 18.0 billion total core search queries in April. Google Sites ranked first with 11.6 billion searches, followed by Yahoo! Sites with 3.2 billion and Microsoft Sites with 2.5 billion.

“Powered By” Reporting
In order to accurately represent the continued evolution of the search landscape, comScore is providing insight into the share of algorithmic explicit searches that are powered by Google and Bing, and branded as such to the consumer. Google’s “powered by” share is composed of searches conducted at Google entities, as well as branded searches at AOL and Ask. Bing’s “powered by” share is composed of searches conducted at Microsoft entities as well as branded Yahoo! entities.

In April, 67.8 percent of searches carried organic search results from Google, while 26.5 percent of searches were powered by Bing organic results.

About comScore
comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR) is a global leader in measuring the digital world and preferred source of digital business analytics.

Source: comScore

“Green sites earned the #1 spot on the top gaining categories ranking in March — a result of Americans seeking ways to cut back on energy consumption beyond Earth Hour amid a backdrop of skyrocketing gas prices,” said Jeff Hackett, executive vice president of comScore Media Metrix. “Travel sites were also popular during the month as many Americans booked last minute spring break trips and looked ahead to plan summer vacations.”

Americans Paint the Web Green
Year-round tree huggers and gas price-conscious Americans alike had reason to visit Green sites in March. The category drew nearly 20 million visitors during the month, up 11 percent versus February to rank as the top gaining category. Planet Green Sites topped the category with nearly 2.9 million visitors, representing a 24-percent increase from the prior month. Care2.com came in second with 1.9 million visitors, followed by Shine Green with 1.7 million and Mother Nature Network with 1.5 million (up 3 percent). Matter Network grew 37 percent to 985,000 visitors, while EnergyGuide.com saw 870,000 and EPA.gov reached 833,000 (up 17 percent).

Travel Sites Spring into Action
Americans frequented travel sites in March, putting several of the travel subcategories among the top gainers. Travel Information sites attracted more than 61.4 million visitors, up 10 percent from the prior month. TravelAdNetwork took the top spot with 19.9 million visitors (up 8 percent), followed by Yahoo! Travel with 12.6 million (up 22 percent), Tripadvisor Sites with 10.0 million (up 14 percent) and AOL Travel with 6.5 million (up 63 percent).

Car Rental sites grew 9 percent to 6.0 million unique visitors in March, with Enterprise Rent-A-Car Company taking the #1 spot with 3.3 million visitors (up 9 percent) and Avis Budget Group with 1.8 million (up 4 percent). Hertz came in third with 979,000 visitors, followed by Dollar Thrifty Automotive Group, Inc. with 968,000 (up 19 percent) and CarRentals.com with 934,000 (up 31 percent).

Traffic Builds at Home Improvement Sites
Americans browsed Home Improvement sites in March for fresh decorating ideas and gardening tips. More than 49 million people visited the category during the month (up 10 percent vs. February), with eHow Home and Garden taking the top spot with 8.8 million visitors. iVillage Home and Garden drew 6.8 million visitors (up 32 percent), followed by HGTV with 6.1 million (up 13 percent) and Shelterpop with 3.0 million (up 46 percent).

Top 50 Properties
Yahoo! Sites ranked as the #1 property in March with 179.5 million visitors, followed by Google Sites with 176.8 million and Microsoft Sites with 176.4 million. Sites new to the top 50 in March included FoxNews.com (#41), Time Warner (#49) and BuzzMedia (#50).

Top 50 Ad Focus Ranking
Google Ad Network led the March Ad Focus ranking with a reach of 91.7 percent of Americans online, followed by Yahoo! Sites (84.4 percent), Yahoo! Network Plus (83.9 percent) and AOL Advertising (83.8 percent).

About comScore Media Metrix
comScore Media Metrix provides industry-leading Internet audience measurement services that report details of online media usage, visitor demographics and online buying power for the home, work and university audiences across local U.S. markets and across the globe. comScore Media Metrix reports are used by financial analysts, advertising agencies, publishers and marketers. comScore Media Metrix syndicated ratings are based on industry-sanctioned sampling methodologies.

About comScore
comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR) is a global leader in measuring the digital world and preferred source of digital business analytics.

The company will become the first media research provider to offer a syndicated service monitoring online paid search activity, which represented a $3.4 billion market during the fourth quarter of 2010 in the U.S. With this expansion, Kantar Media will also become the only source of competitive intelligence to monitor the entire online ad market, bringing methodic insight into display, video, ad networks and paid search advertising trends, as well as detailed data on spend, impressions and creative.

The new service will define for users those companies investing in paid search, expenditure allocated, keywords purchased, and the number of clicks keywords receive.

Kantar Media’s analysis of paid search advertisers for the 2010 holiday period, a crucial time period for e-commerce, shows significant investment from online retailers and travel companies in the top five. Interestingly, four financial companies feature among the top 10, three of them in the insurance category.

Syndicated search reporting will be integrated into Kantar Media’s StradegyTM application, which already provides comprehensive advertising information on 3 million brands across 21 media. As an additional medium, it will provide monthly reporting on paid search activity for Google’s U.S. search engine, giving subscribers granular, reliable data points on search advertisers. The service will also include historical data going back to January 2010, enabling the analysis of trends and shifts over time.

“Kantar Media’s new service brings us one step closer to a holistic perspective of the competitive dynamics occurring within the digital landscape,” says Gregory Aston, SVP, Director of Competitive Intelligence for MPG. “The core value is the ability to track evolving competitive strategies over time and raise the bar from telling digital anecdotes about our competitors to enabling more comprehensive, systematic analysis.”

“As the first to market with syndicated paid search reporting, Kantar Media Intelligence is now the only source of competitive intelligence that monitors the full array of digital advertising activity and can offer subscribers a single source of insights through a common methodology,” says Mark Nesbitt, President, Kantar Media Intelligence. “This innovative launch further establishes our position as the marketplace experts focused on tracking advertising wherever it appears.”

About Kantar Media
Established in more than 50 countries, Kantar Media helps clients master the world’s multimedia momentum through analysis of print, radio, TV, internet, cinema, mobile, social media, and outdoor worldwide. Kantar Media offers a full range of media insights and audience measurement services through its global business sectors – Intelligence, Audiences, TGI and Custom. Kantar Media companies also include Compete, Cymfony and SRDS. Drawing upon the deepest expertise in the industry, Kantar Media tracks more than 3 million brands and delivers insight to more than 22,000 customers worldwide.

Source: Kantar Media

A few shouts to fellow online marketers and paid search gurus out there who’ve voiced some concerns or adulated Google Instant:

Les Jones pointed out how some marketers raised concern as to how this may impact impressions and click-through rates for better or for worse and whether Google Instant spells the death of long tail.

DigitalBuzzLog offers a video to offer up support for Google Instant. They take a more high-brow approach, will it change the SEO game from a visual and language perspective?

There’s no doubt, given Google’s highly data driven and user focused world that aspects of Google Instant, while daunting at first, wouldn’t be highly beneficial.

Here are the basic benefits of Google Instant for those not yet familiar with it:

Faster Searches: Google predicts your search showing results instantly as you’re typing. According to Google Instant this alone will save users 2-5 seconds per search.

Smarter Predictions: Google attempts to predict what you’re looking for when you may not know exactly what you’re setting out search for. As you type your sesrch query the top keyword prediction is shown in gray text directly in the search box, so users can stop typing as visually identify what you’re looking for.

Instant Search Results: The time between you typing in your search a letter at a time is extremely diminished as Google now displays search results litterly as you type. Many of my colleagues have confused this feature as “real-time” search results, that is not the case.

Now onto some stats on how this change has effected engagement as a result of search and Google Instant. According to Paid search management platform Marin Software, impressions and clicks increased in the two weeks after Instant’s launch compared with the two weeks before, while cost-per-click and clickthrough rates dropped. Overall costs increased slightly in the same period:

Research from search marketing solutions provider Covario, however, did not find the same increase in overall impressions, though it did record an increase in clicks on paid search ads—leading to higher, not lower, clickthrough rates. The company reported a shift in total search clicks away from organic and toward paid results, while cost per click remained constant.

Covario reported stable clickthrough rates for most search engines, but found Instant already had an effect on the search giant’s rates, bumping them up from 2.2% to 2.6% between Q2 and Q3 2010.

Whether you’re in the Marin camp or Covario camp, I’d love to hear more about whether there’s a sales correlation to this data. I’ll let you help me with my readers, how has Google Instant effected your business?