The findings come from a report released by SearchIgnite, a provider of search optimization technology. “This is the second consecutive quarter of sequential growth for paid search spend, indicating marketer’s continued confidence in search marketing as an efficient component of their overall marketing mix ,” said Roger Barnette, President of SearchIgnite. “Multi-channel retailers in particular have continued to rely more heavily on paid search as a key driver of sales in a challenging economic environment.”

According to the report, Microsoft’s Bing showed the most pronounced growth in spend among all engines, up 15% year-over-year. By contrast, spend on Yahoo! was down -24% year-over-year. Despite these spend shifts, there was no movement in search share quarter-over-quarter, with all engines maintaining their respective positions. Year-over-year saw Yahoo! lose share to Google, while Bing showed little growth. “Microsoft is headed in the right direction with Bing and attracting more advertiser dollars. That said, it’s an uphill battle against Google and there’s still a long way to go before Bing garners a significant amount of the search ad revenue pie,” added Mr. Barnette.

If you are interested in more details you may download the white paper at http://www.searchignite.com/.

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14 free tools that reveal why people abandon your website

Although US consumers are pessimistic about the health of the economy, they expressed a marked interest in the ability of the Web to save them money. Forty-eight percent of consumers surveyed, compared with 41 percent in 2007, said that they can find the best values and deals online. Additionally, 36 percent of consumers said that they would be more likely to shop online due to high gas prices, compared with 22 percent who expressed the same sentiment last year. Forrester expects that the majority of holiday online sales will be driven by shoppers who have previously purchased online, rather than first time online buyers.

“While eCommerce has traditionally been resistant to negative offline trends, growing concerns about the stability of the economy are finally affecting consumers’ online shopping decisions,” said Forrester Research Principal Analyst Sucharita Mulpuru. “This is going to be a very competitive online shopping season, so retailers should take immediate steps to bolster their customer retention strategies in order to ensure repeat purchases.”

More than two-thirds of consumers surveyed said that they are planning to spend more or about the same online as they did last year. Core holiday product categories such as clothing will remain top choices for online buyers, as well as books, DVDs/videos, music, gift certificates, and toys. Respondents also indicated that they will be seeking free shipping offers more often this year than last.

“A main attraction of the online shopping environment is the breadth of information that it offers,” said Patti Freeman Evans, Forrester Research Vice President and Research Director. “Retailers should expand their use of online marketing tactics on search engines and comparison-shopping sites since shoppers are likely to be researching the Web more thoroughly when deciding on this year’s holiday gifts.”

This year’s annual holiday forecast was a collaboration between Forrester Research and JupiterResearch, now a Forrester Research company. Two surveys were conducted to measure the attitudes and expectations of online consumers during the upcoming holiday shopping season, which was defined as the months of November and December. The first survey was fielded in September 2008 and received 2,153 individual responses. The second survey was fielded in early October 2008 and received 1,042 individual responses.

MySpace MyAds

“With MySpace MyAds, we’re blowing the lid off display advertising solutions for small and medium businesses,” said Jeff Berman, President of Sales and Marketing for MySpace. “MySpace MyAds is a direct marketer’s dream – providing entrepreneurs with the most accessible, personalized, and targeted advertising toolkit in the market. We’re giving businesses better ROI ASAP and in today’s economy, that’s a must-have.”

MySpace MyAds empowers any advertiser to build a customized, targeted, and measurable campaign in a few easy steps:

• STEP 1: Visit https://advertise.myspace.com or click the “Advertise” link located at the bottom of any MySpace page
• STEP 2: Create a display ad using the MySpace MyAds Builder Tool
• STEP 3: Select a variable ad spend anywhere from $25 to $10,000
• STEP 4: HyperTarget to customers
• STEP 5: Measure ad performance with MySpace MyAds analytics reporting

MySpace’s HyperTargeting ad technology is a key component in the functionality of the MySpace MyAds platform enabling advertisers to serve their ad campaign to the right customers. HyperTargeting enables marketers to connect with specific user groups on a massive scale based on self-expressed interests available on MySpace profiles. The technology allows any MySpace MyAds user access to targeting parameters such as age, sex, and geographical location, all in combination with thousands of user interest categories including specific keywords within each category. For example, within the ‘videogame’ enthusiast category, a further targeting keyword or phrase might include ‘Call of Duty 5’ if relevant to an advertiser’s campaign.

“After spending $100 on MySpace MyAds to advertise, I got a roofing assignment valued at $30,000 all in a matter of eight days,” said Dan Davis, owner of D&D Installation, a Chicago roofing company.

Once the creative, audience and campaign length have been determined by the advertiser, the newly created ad is reviewed through MySpace’s dedicated customer support, safeguarding that the ad does not violate MySpace’s terms of service. Once approved, and depending on the timing the advertiser has chosen, the campaign can go live across the MySpace ecosystem to the audience segments that the campaign creator has chosen. Campaign set-up and results can be completed and tracked in as little as a few hours.

MySpace MyAds provides all advertisers with a suite of analytic tools and key performance indicators that accompany every campaign including the number of times their ad was shown (impressions), the number of click-throughs, and a running cost on active campaigns. Using the analytics provided by MySpace MyAds, advertisers are able to renew successful campaigns, tweak under-performing campaigns, and edit existing creative. The campaign is charged only when a user clicks on the ad (rather than when the ad is served) and is able to run an unlimited number of campaigns at any time.

MySpace recently hit an all-time high with domestic unique users and engagement in August according to comScore; seeing approximately 76 million users domestically—each averaging more than 4 hours on the site every month—and 122 million worldwide unique users. comScore also reported MySpace surpassed Yahoo! to become the top publisher of online display advertising in the U.S., accounting for 15.9% of all display ads viewed in June.

We’re always working on innovative ways to make your experience on Facebook more useful. Toward that goal, today we’ve added Microsoft Live Search to your Facebook search experience (for people in the US). This is the first step in giving you the ability to find content from across the web while using Facebook.

It is also the first step in expanding Microsoft’s search reach. This move should have been expected to some extend. Now Facebook offers both display/banner and search ads, gets to keep visitors within the Facebook environment a little longer, and adds a revenue stream from the text ads displayed when someone performs a Web search.

Sounds like a win-win here.