Paid Search is Expanding

Bambi Francisco's article (sorry, the article is behind a subscription wall at CBS MarketWatch) this morning is about law firms using paid search advertising to troll for Vioxx clients. The really interesting tidbits in the article are that pay per click advertising accounts for 40% of online advertising expenditures and is growing at 63% per year. Admittedly, these are some of the rosier forecasts we have seen, but everyone agrees that paid search is soon going to account for the majority of online advertising spending. It makes sense because paid search is tied to performance, and pay for performance always wins. She also makes the point that as news search becomes a more prominent feature for search users, more keywords will become valuable (for the duration of the news cycle) and then drop again. So the keyword universe that many advertisers complain has become limited looks like it will be a little more flexible. Companies will also have to be able to rapidly take advantage of newly popular keywords by being able to quickly create and place effective campaigns containing effective ad copy with the major paid search providers (Google and Overture) - something we are addressing with our new product.
Stay tuned.