Report: Search starting to rebound

If you're looking for good news from the marketing sector, Efficient Frontier has a bit. According to the company's US Search Engine Performance Report, based on Q2 numbers, search engine marketing is beginning to rebound from the bad economy. The report indicates that search engines are once more gaining share and operating at higher rates.

by Kristina Knight

Overall SEM spending from Q2 2008 through Q2 2009 dropped by 21%. How is that a rebound? For Q1 year over year, the decline was 23%. So, in Q2 the decrease was slightly less and an improvement. Marketers are continuing to spend less on SEM (3% decrease).

Researchers say Bing is part of the reason for the rebound. According to their research Bing has increased the click share for mother-company Microsoft by 5% and has increased the paid click share in both the finance and travel sectors by more than 10%. On the other hand, search giant Google continues to recede in spend share, most likely because marketers are still spending less overall.

Categories which are showing growth include automotive, travel and finance, as noted above, but retail remains flat. This isn't necessarily a big deal because consumers are still tight with any extra money at this point. The good news for retail is that impression volume is once more rising.