Search Engine Marketing Remains a Key and Growing Part of Digital Ad Budgets

Q3 2012 third-party reports cite healthy increases in SEM spend and better advertiser returns on Yahoo! and Bing
Recently, several of the leading SEM agencies and technology providers published Q3 reports on the digital marketing and advertising landscape in Q3, reporting on search and several other areas. Since these companies manage a large number of accounts across a fairly broad cross-section of industries, their findings are typically a good gauge for how the search advertising market is trending overall. You can check out the full reports from Kenshoo, Marin Software, Covario, Ignition One, The Search Agency and RKG, but here are some of the highlights: Most reports cited an increase in search spend anywhere from 13% to 29% year over year, partially driven by an overall increase in click volume.

Kenshoo noted that click-through rates on the Yahoo! Bing Network were 29% higher than Google. Marin found that Yahoo! and Bing are continuing to show solid growth in aggregate click volume, with an increase of 9% year over year, as well as a 9% increase in click-through rate. The Search Agency found that the "…search industry overall is continuing to thrive. Over the last quarter we've seen higher quality traffic on Yahoo!-Bing, driving advertisers to invest more in the growing search engine." According to Covario, growth in paid search advertising was up 33% in the third quarter compared to a year earlier, and up 6% over Q2 '12. But we think Kenshoo put it best when they said that the Yahoo! Bing Network is a "must buy" and citing a higher click-through rate than Google., as well as delivering consistently better ROAS.