Leverage Marketing

Paid Search Spending Slows

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Enter the words “Paid Search Spending Slows” into the search engine of your choice and you will see a deluge of articles – mainly about Google’s dim prospects for the future.   One of the articles I found “Note to Google: Paid search growth seen slowing” was from August of 2004.  As early as four years ago, analysts were predicting the maturation of the Search Market and Google’s growth.  What this means is that at one time new search entrants may have been growing by leaps and bounds but as more people have entered the market, the rate of growth has slowed.  News of this slowdown in search growth can also be seen as late as this month.  According to a recent study by Covario and released by Btobonline “Year-over-Year growth in paid search stood at 32% in the third quarter, compared with 83% year-over-year growth in the first quarter of 2007.”

It’s important to point out that paid search spending is slowing not declining.  This trend is very important to the growth of all of our customers pay per click accounts, because we need to keep in mind:
•    Consumers are still searching online and clicking on businesses paid search ads.
•    Marketers (some who may be your competition) are advertising and hope “ready, willing and able” buyers click on their paid search ads.
•    People like you and me are purchasing products and services online at a rapid pace.

We also have to look at the time frames compared when we hear of a slowdown of any sort.  In the study released by Covario – the time frame compared is the 1st quarter of 2007 to the 3rd quarter of 2008. Perhaps a more accurate time frame to account for the slowdown would have been from the 3rd quarter of 2007 to the 3rd quarter of 2008.  Obviously you would not want to compare the performance of your Pay Per Click Campaign in September 2008 to how it performed in February 2007.  In my opinion, that is just silly and you will most likely end up with a trend that has little value to the future of your account.

We all know the economy is changing, search marketing is maturing, but advertising online with pay per click marketing is probably going to give you better results than passing out business cards at your local grocery store or even running ads in the newspaper.  Keep in mind, Leverage Marketing can assist with your paid search marketing, but can also assist with your organic search needs through our Search Engine Optimization (SEO) department.