Google commissioned a study through Media Screen to measure the impact of paid search ads on organic search terms for four consumer packaged goods (CPG) categories: cosmetic, beverage, food/snack, and household/laundry.

Respondents were asked to complete a brand survey to measure the brand impact on aided awareness, unaided awareness, purchase intent, and purchase consideration after being exposed to search results.

Key findings:

When the test brand appeared in paid search positions, unaided awareness and purchase intent increased for that brand.

The survey also observed the impact on competitive brands and found: When the test brand appeared in paid search positions, unaided and aided awareness decreased for other brands.

Yahoo! did a similar study with Media Vest and found that a sponsored search link has a positive impact on unaided awareness. Conclusions were that search provides branding for consumer packaged goods.

Source: Google CPG Blog

Note: There are other studies and sources to support the branding value of search; if interested contact me directly.

· Removal of the minimum bid requirement. This will be replaced by “first page bid,” which is the bid estimated to get your ad on page one. All listings will be eligible to appear, and positioning will be based on quality score and maximum bid amount.

· Quality Score will now be calculated at the time of each search query.

· Keywords will no longer be judged “inactive for search.”

These changes will produce a lot more listings for any given search phrase if advertisers are willing to pay. It remains to be seen if advertisers will pay more to be on the first page. If the past is any indication, they probably will because paid search is effective, affordable and accountable if you have the advertising budget.

Google will make these quality score changes to a very small set of advertisers over the next few days with a full rollout in the coming weeks.

Source AdWords Blogspot

Other search engines remained stable or declined slightly. AOL gained (3 percent), Yahoo! and Ask dropped (2.5% and 1.3%, respectively), and MSN remained the same.
This year’s survey gives the highest satisfaction score to Google (86), with other portals trailing. Yahoo!’s score was 77; MSN’s, 75; Ask’s, 74 and AOL’s, 69.

Conducted by the University of Michigan and ForeSee, the American Consumer Satisfaction Index began their annual consumer satisfaction surveys 14 years ago.
The report notes its consumer satisfaction data correlates with market share data from Hitwise. In June, Google had 69.2 percent market share, up from June last year at 63.9 percent.

ForeSee President Larry Freed attributes the big gain to word of mouth about many of Google’s non search products. “On one hand, there’s a simple and basic interface to search,” said Freed. “But Google is also known as an innovative company and has other great apps that are slowly starting to gain market share. … As they launch these things, sometimes it takes a while until users get to know it.”

Source: AdAge
Source: SearchEngineLand

Available from Business Week’s Web site, the topic pages will feature links to articles and blog posts from many different sources including auto-generated aggregated content from competitors. Topic pages can be as narrow as “Toyota Camry” or as broad as “the auto market,” thus serving as topic verticals. The purpose is to gain new readers, funneling them into niches that will attract advertisers.

What’s interesting is that users can post articles, creating a new page by choosing the subject and title, and writing a brief introductory description. Users can also add new material to an existing topic page. However, this requires editorial approval and objectionable posts will be removed. They promise editorial review in 24 hours.

Source: New York Times

Pew Internet and American Life Project 2008 shows that the number of Internet users making search engine queries on a typical day has increased to 49 percent, inching closer to the 60 percent of users checking and sending email on a typical day.

Full Report: PEW/Internet

However, compared to traditional advertising, Internet advertising still trails by substantial margins. For instance, it trails direct mail by over $30B, and spending on TV and print ads is nearly twice as much as online ad spending.

The IDC report shows the following:

Keyword ads will dominate Internet advertising through 2011, getting over one-third of the annual online ad spending budget worldwide.

Display ads are next in popularity with over 20% of annual worldwide spending through 2011.

Classifieds are next, with almost 19% of all online ad spending per year.

Rich media ads will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of over 50% during the 2007-2011 forecast period.

Additional highlights from the study:

The US will lead the world in both total advertising spend and online ad spend throughout the forecast period with expenditures of over $265 billion and $45 billion respectively in 2011.

Over $5 billion will be spent worldwide in 2008 in each of the top four categories of online ads: adult content and gambling, information, electronics, and computing. These categories will continue to lead in 2011.

Source: IDC

Evidently Adobe is releasing technology to Google and Yahoo enabling them to crawl and index SWF files, making them searchable. This will give searchers access to millions of Flash files.

As pointed out by TechCrunch, this will not take Flash sites to the top of the SERPs any time soon because in the past, Flash files were difficult to find and link to.

Source: TechCrunch

That means if you view ads for certain items, Google would put 2 and 2 together to later serve you ads for related items. A search for canoes and vacations might elicit ads for trips to Vermont.

Source: New York Times

With Viewzi, you type in your query and then pick among many different formats: video x3 view, 3D photo cloud view, basic photo view, simple text, web screenshot, etc. Then you see the thumbnail in that format before downloading the page.

With SearchMe, you type your query and then select categories below (advertising & marketing, search engines, computer networking, business news, radio or search all). Then you see some nice size thumbnails you can click on to download the page.

This makes Web Site and page design more important than ever. While Google isn’t doing this yet, Ask provides page previews.

Imagine how such a feature might affect search marketing as the trend toward social and visual interaction takes hold on the web. The impression your page preview makes before eliciting a click will be crucial as web design and content drive traffic.

· Google 61%
· Yahoo 18%
· MSN 5%

Nielsen reports mobile search usage frequency as follows per person:
· Google 9 searches per month
· Yahoo 6.7 searches per month

The top 3 mobile search categories for Q1 2008 were reported as Information, Local Listings and Websites/Navigation.

Source: Nielsen Mobile