January Search Market Overview:
According to the latest ComScore data, Bing experienced a 13% rise in search queries in January 2011:
In overall market share, Bing also jumped up from 12% to 13.1% market share in the US during January.
ComScore released a summary overview of the search market in 2010. Here are the overall changes in the US search market during 2010, according to their data:
More info here:
http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2011/comScore_Releases The_2010_U.S._Digital_Year_in_Review
Experian Hitwise reports similar data in their report for January. One interesting addition – according to the data in the Hitwise report, Bing is a more successful search engine than Google: over 81% of searches in Bing result in a visit to a website, while in Google only 65% of searches conclude in the same way. Google’s Matt Cutts criticized this metric, as according to what he says here, HitWise have no way of knowing whether a user visited a search result or a completely unrelated website.
http://www.hitwise.com/us/press-center/press-releases/bing-searches-increase-twenty-one-percent/
http://www.seroundtable.com/bing-success-google-failure-12956.html
ComScore included Facebook data in their 2010 review, and the results are very interesting:
It looks like all the performance metrics of Facebook have all gone up in double digits during the past year.
More data here: http://searchengineland.com/facebooks-2010-metrics-dominant-still-growing-comscore-says-64110
Let’s take a step away from US data and take a look at the global search statistics, some of which can be surprising:
- Today, the US market represents only about 12% of the global users.
- Nigeria has the 10th highest number of Internet users globally
- The fastest growing language on the internet is Arabic
More data here: http://searchenginewatch.com/3641863
And here: http://searchenginewatch.com/3641913
Google news:
Longer Headlines: Google is experimenting with displaying some ads in a new way: For some ads, the first description line will be moved to the headline and displayed right after the title, separated by a hyphen. The ads for this change will be selected by Google, in order to be selected, the ad needs to have proper punctuation, with each line of the description appearing to be a complete sentence.
This means that the title of your can be longer and contain an exclamation mark!
This is in addition to the recent change in capitalization of display URLs – from now on, the domain names in the display URLs will not be capitalized, meaning now there will be more accent on the capitalization of subdirectories.
http://adwords.blogspot.com/2011/02/longer-headlines-for-select-ads-on.html
http://www.ppchero.com/why-and-how-you-should-rethink-ad-writing-and-bidding-strategies/
No more managed placements bid: The managed placements default bid will be removed in March, instead managed placements will be using the display network default bid. You will still be able to set managed placements bid individually per placement.
http://adwords.blogspot.com/2011/02/simplifying-bidding-on-google-display.html
Is there an account quality score on Facebook? If so, it’s based on trust and reputation (unlike Google’s relevance-driven quality score). Here are some tips on maintaining high quality scores on Facebook:
Facebook will actively penalize advertisers for having high CTRs over large demographics (over 0.4% ctr for 500,000 users), for ads that go over that Facebook are going to be much stricter about anything that might be misleading or offencive.
http://ppcblog.com/facebook-quality-score/
According to a WebTrends report, CTRs on Facebook ads averaged 0.05%, and the average price of clicks is increasing, rising from $0.27 in 2009 to $0.49 in 2010.
http://searchengineland.com/study-facebook-ad-click-throughs-declining-63324
MSN
Here is a nice Q&A article with some interesting points about Bing advertising. Some highlights:
You can set negatives in Bing not only on the campaign and ad group level but only at the keyword level. You can’t set negatives at the account level.
In Bing, dynamic text can be used both in Search and Content ads: in search the dynamic test is related to the keyword, while in content, the ad is related to the content of the website your ad appears on.
More here: http://www.ppchero.com/creating-killer-ads-using-bing-dynamic-text-2/
Thanks for reading,
Orit
