Retail Rebounds- Fourth Quarter SEM Spend Recap
February 9th, 2010
Performance marketing agency Efficient Frontier released a research report outlining the overall performance of the search marketing space in the fourth quarter of 2009. These results have specific implications in terms of the strength of the economic rebound and the health of industries that favor certain engines over others.
The indicator of fourth quarter performance is always retail, due to holiday shopping. In 2009, retail search marketing spend grew 17% year over year and 46% quarter over quarter. Cost per click gains were strong sequentially (quarter over quarter), however year over year they remained down about 9%. This suppressed potential growth in spend for the quarter. Year over year click-through rates have dropped over 40%, but many surmise this is due to Google and other engines simplifying the comparative shopping process within the search engine results page. Conversions per click year over year remained flat.
Outside of the retail sector, the consumer base is still leery about the economic recovery and how freely they should be spending their money. Spend on travel has dropped 20% year over year and 25% compared to Q3. Also, the impact of Cash for Clunkers wasn’t lasting, but did raise CPC 7% year over year encouraging a 2% raise in spend by the auto industry.
In Q4, Google’s share of clicks rose to 74.4% while Yahoo! lost 3.4% dropping their share to 21% and Bing held steady at 4.6%. In terms of spend, Google’s share rose to 74.5%, Yahoo! lost .5% (a strengthening CPC at Yahoo! offset the loss of clicks) and Bing dropped slightly .2% to 5.1%. For the retail segment alone, Google was the overwhelming favorite with 82.7% of spend; however, in the finance segment, Google only claimed a 60.1% share due to Yahoo!’s market leading finance software.
In the upcoming year, Efficient Frontier predicts 30% growth for Bing, which would give the engine 6-7% share of clicks. The performance marketing firm also predicts 15-20% growth in SEM spend for 2010. This growth is to be driven by further economic recovery in addition to incremental increases in online marketing budgets.
Posted in Search Marketing by Peter Figueredo | | 0 Comments
