More energy continues to go into PPC advertising. According to DoubleClick, while the cost of keywords held steady in Q2:

Year-over-year overall spending on search and impressions grew by almost 50 percent; active keywords grew by 58 percent while total clicks increased by 32 percent.

Obviously marketers are getting smarter about how many keywords they’re using in their campaigns. Without knowing, though, how these increased keywords and increased spending have affected the overall ROI - or effectiveness of PPC advertising - it’s hard to assess what these numbers really mean for marketers.

Clicks increasing by 32% and the fact that terms that previously cost between 21 and 99 cents now go for more than $1, does mean that the engines are making hay.

I’ll bet that when Q3 numbers come out we’ll see an even greater proportional increase in the take for the engines. With 60% of the market share, Google’s recent update is bound to boost its take considerably.

All this can’t help but make me wonder how much longer natural SEO (non-paid results) are going to be relevant. What’s to gain on the part of the search engines by putting any development, resources, etc. into natural results? Especially for Google, who doesn’t have CPM advertising all over their pages…

MediaPost Publications - Performics: Q2 Keyword Costs Flat - 10/02/2006


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