14 DAY TRIAL // In another sign of the economy recovering, ad spending is once again rising at significant pace. Search ad spending increased by 23 percent year over year and an impressive 18 percent quarter over quarter in Q4 2010, according to a report from Efficient Frontier, a search marketing agency.
The rise in spending is evident across all sectors and, once again, Google was the big winner, though the consolidated Bing plus Yahoo has the potential to carve out more market share, the report says.
"The strong growth in all sectors was mainly due to Cost Per Click (CPC) increases and is an indication of larger budget appetite and competition among advertisers as well as increased consumer demand. Both advertisers and consumers are signaling their belief that the economy is in the midst of a potential turnaround," the report reads.
Google was the big winner of the last year, adding 4.6 percent market share and increasing click rate share by eight percent.
All of that came, of course, straight from Bing and Yahoo. At first glance, the two search engines combined seem to be doing worse than they were before.
But that may not necessarily be the case. In fact, in the last quarter, after search results and ads started coming from the same place for both Bing and Yahoo search, the two didn't lose any more market share.
What's more, revenue performance increased in the last quarter quite dramatically, closing in on Google's ROI rate, despite a 20 percent gap at the end of Q3.
The report also touches on Google's Ad Exchange performance. As the company itself recently revealed, Google's ad venture proved a big success for a company which hasn't been seeing great results in the display market so far. 70 percent of display ad spending in Q4 went through Google's Ad Exchange.