This Week’s Industry News

Compiled By Rocket Clicks Staff

Search Ad Revenue Set A Record In 2012

What if I told you that 2012 was the best year on record for search advertising revenue? If you react with aghast surprise, you probably don’t work in the digital marketing industry. To the tune of $16.9 billion, the Internet Advertising Bureau’s 2012 revenue report listed search ads as its top money-maker, garnering 46% of all Internet ad revenue.

That number doesn’t include mobile search ads, and is up from the $14.8 billion in search revenue that was produced in 2011. Overall, the industry grew by 15.2%, with mobile ads pulling in $3.4 billion (9% revenue share). Total ad profits hit $36.6 billion in 2012, up from $31.7 billion in 2011.

Source: Search Engine Watch

Google Makes Multiple Updates To Its Search Results Display

Google Related Searches are no longer a thing because no one ever really considered them a useful thing. Google Instant Previews have also been terminated due to little interest from searchers. The search engine monolith added a green arrow dropdown next to search result URLs that opens “cache,” “similar,” and “share” options. Finally, the Google+ authorship snippet is no longer offering a “Read More By” link, instead opting for a headshot and simple “by author” line. Discuss.

Source: Search Engine Land, David Naylor

Bing Study Reveals Heavy Influence Of Ranking At The Top

According to a recent study from Bing’s Research & Development team, 50% of Bing searches click on the first result, and that number improves to 75% if the result includes deep sitelinks. The study found that 4% to 6% of users click on the third result, while 2% to 3% of users will click on the fourth ranked site, yada yada yada.

The article also covers some recent tests from Bing that reduce traditional search results from 14 to four. Bing said the test is an attempt to better display results based on the searcher’s intent.

Source: Search Engine Land

Google Releases Places App, Then Deletes It

A blog recently stumbled onto a Google Places app in the iPhone App Store, only to see it disappear just as quickly as it was discovered. Google was reached for comment, and indicated that the app is only in testing mode, and they don’t know when it will be available for consumers/businesses.

Source: Search Engine Land

AP Twitter Account Hacked

The AP created quite a stir Tuesday when they tweeted out that two explosions had rocked the White House and that the President had been injured in the blasts. What becameclear quickly is that it was all a lie. Someone hacked the AP’s Twitter account and wasn’t even bright enough even use AP style when formatting their inflammatory tweet. The account is currently suspended while the AP looks into security issues.

Source: Mashable

BREAKING: Internet Faster Now, But Not

A recent site speed study conducted by Google found the Web is getting faster-who figured? The study focuses on three metrics-page load time, execution speed of events and the time it takes for browsers to render a download page and its elements. Why is this news? Well, the average size of web pages has increased by 56% since last year. So in actuality, Google found that while the Web is getting faster per se, desktop page load times are down slightly and mobile page load speeds have decreased by 30 percent. So the Web is faster but because its processing more data now its actually not.

Source: Search Engine Land

New Google Related Image Search Interface

Google seems to be tinkering with a new interface for its related image search. While, the current interface for related image searches only show the related queries and thumbnails when you mouse over them new interface shows thumbnails right above the search query.

Source: Search Engine Land

Mozilla Freaks Out Over Manual Google Penalty, Matt Cutts Sobers The Rest Of The Internet Up

A day after Mozilla Web production manager posted in Google’s help forum about receiving a spam penalty message in Webmaster Tools, Matt Cutts took to the tube-waves and explained that the action itself was manual, and only applied to the user-generated page in question.

The case is similar to that of the BBC’s a few months ago, and is sad in the sense that the webmaster at an extremely prominent website did not understand the distinction.

Source: Search Engine Land

Notable Commentary

Better Than The NFL Draft

Quality Score Is More Important Than Ever

That’s the idea behind a Search Engine Journal post that explains how the average QS has dropped over the last four years, what the current distribution of score it, why it has more value, and how you can go about improving yours immediately.

Analysis By: Larry Kim, Search Engine Journal

How Social Network Advertising Could Topple Google’s Search Ad Dominance

Facebook and Twitter advertising has long been a punch line in the search ad community, mostly due to their inability to use their wealth of data to move beyond “demand generation” and into “demand fulfillment.”

However, TechCrunch has an excellent article that explains why both networks are getting much, much better at serving up ads that meet users along various points of the purchasing funnel. It’s a really smart look into the future of search advertising, and how Google’s market share is very likely to shrink over the next few years.

Analysis By: Josh Constine, TechCrunch

Interested In Graphing Out Online Purchasing Funnels By Industry?

Of course you are! Google Analytics has created a really cool interactive graphic that breaks down how customers travel through various mediums before purchasing from a website. Called “The Customer Journey to Online Purchase,” Google drew Ecommerce and Multi-Channel Funnels data to create the benchmark report that helps explain some of the most common assist-to-conversion paths for 11 different industries.

Analysis By: Amy Gesenhues, Marketing Land

Two PPC Metrics = 2,000 Words Of Analysis And Insight

Using just Impression Share and Average Position, Mike Fleming breaks down five advertisers in a chosen keyword space, and gleans a surprisingly robust amount of information just from those two metrics.

Analysis By: Mike Fleming, Pole Positioning Marketing

SERP Conditioning And The Theft Of Organic Traffic

The addition of Product Listing Ads, the Knowledge Graph, Google Maps, and other Google search features have led to multiple iterations of Google’s search results, depending on the query. As such, organic click behavior has shifted. Ben Goodsell explores this concept and asks people to take a closer look at their best ranking keywords to determine how these additions may be impacting click-throughs.

Analysis By: Ben Goodsell, Search Engine Watch

The Pros And Cons Of Five Big Brand Search Ads

Wordstream has an interesting post that “audits” the effectiveness of five PPC ads created by some of the biggest brands in paid search. Good or bad, we can all learn something from companies that have bottomless pits of cash to spend on advertising.

Analysis By: Elisa Gabbert, Wordstream

Pointing The Finger When SEO Fails

Amanda DiSilvestro explains who we should blame when an SEO strategy fails. The answer: it depends, but the SEO agency is more than likely to take the blame whether it’s their fault or not.

Analysis by: Amanda DiSilvestro, Search Engine Journal