I admit I like statistics so I was glad to cover this session. The first speaker up was David Hallerman from eMarketer and tells the audience that he is a New Yorker and going to go very fast. I hope he is kidding cause fast is not necessarily fun. He says that this year alone will be a bigger year in terms of online advertising spending. No surprise here. He says that 16.7 billion will be spent, and next year it will be over 20 billion. This year 5-8% of all spending online will be on internet ads. By 2009 internet ad spending will be bigger than radio ads. Paid search spending dominates the internet ad pie with over 21% of all spending. Search is all things to all departments. US paid search ad spending will surpass 10 billion mark in 2009. However during the first 3 years of the millennia there was hyper growth in the 150-200% per year. That can be good to maintain as it will create a bubble. There has been a decline from those years starting in 2003 but it’s a good thing, as its growth that is consistent. Nielsen in June 26 said that Google had 49% of the market. Sue Decker the CFO of Yahoo even said that its not there goal to be #1. Looking at Google and Yahoo together they dominate the search space. He also says that most people have had a positive experience with Google. However not everyone is a fan of Google. 44% of internet users only use one search engine. According to Sergey Brin, the “no 1. fact that contributed to our success over the past seven years was luck”. David also mentions that the research companies have different takes on the situation. They are not all right, but not all wrong. Its difficult to count and measure search completely. According to eMarketing us local search spending is lower than last year. Local is not performing as well as had predicted. It’s a very specialized areas that need good knowledge on local markets. Advertisers and agencies have mixed attitudes about local search. He then explains where people look first for local business listings. It varies greatly. Two trends in local search. One is younger people who spend more time online. The other trends is people who have more money. Local will continue to surprise us completely over the next few years. He also mentions that conversion data about which is better SEO or paid search varies. For example he says that paid search does a better job converting in the offline area (example: car brands, dealerships). But at the same time SEO converts better in a delayed purchase cycle. 39% of US adult internet users search once a day or even more often. So what about the share of time spent online. Search has the lowest share of time. Makes sense though, if search works then its in and out and on your way. Complex searches are growing and the most recent data shows paid search is still definitive in creating conversions. He next talks about shopping. It’s a huge space. 74% of users are looking for more information about a product or service. 66% of us adults often or always research online before buying. 55% of US adults often or always research online to find the best price.
He says that 25% are not worried about click fraud, but all the rest are. 60% of US adults say: “search engines should not permanently store users search behaviors”. 51% of US adults “we’re not confident that the data search engines collect will remain private. 1/4 of US internet users would not continue to use Google if it released information about their searches to the government.
Bill Tancer from Hitwise is up next. He talks about how fascinating search term data is and the revelations you can gleam from it. Bill is a huge fan of data and loves economics he start by walking through his day. He mentions the Hitwise blog as well which has some cool information at www.ilovedata.com for search marketers. He talks a lot about prom dresses interestingly enough and I recommend checking out his blog for that information. Also be sure to check our the Mystery of the Golden Spruce.
