Search Engine Marketing Blog

Two recent snippets of news should bring some cheer amongst the incessant reports of recession and predictions of doom that seem to dominate the press at the moment.

Google announced yesterday that their revenue for the second quarter of 2008 topped $5.37 billion. This is an increase of 39% compared to the same period in 2007 and a small increase over quarter one of 2008.

Perhaps more importantly is the fact that within the UK, online shopping spend has increased by 38% in the first half of this year compared to the same period in 2007. The total amount spent online was £26.5 billion, according to findings recently published by IMRG and Capgemini.

UK shoppers now spend 17 pence in every pound online, almost 20% of total retail spending.

This could, of course, just be down to the fact that with many households feeling the squeeze they are turning online to ‘bag a bargain’ but hopefully the buoyant trend of Internet shopping will continue.

Hopefully we’ll be reporting more good news soon, including how rival London gangs have turned to hugging each other in a ‘love off’ and how Team GB are confident of winning at least one bronze medal in the Olympics*

*London, not Beijing

Browser usage statistics for the month of June again make interesting reading. Microsoft Internet Explorer again is losing market share while both Firefox and Safari continue to be on the increase according to NetApplications.com.

Browser Usage Statistics for June 2008:

For a full breakdown and more in-depth analysis visit Market Share

Mozilla has succeeded and achieved a new world record for the most number of downloads in a day. In total there were officially 8,002,530 downloads of Firefox 3.0 in the twenty-four hour period.

Features of the new version of this web browser include:

• A smart location bar which over time can adapt to your preferences.
• Password manager remembers different site’s passwords.
• Improved performance which allows you view web pages faster.

If you haven’t yet downloaded your new version of Firefox 3.0 why not do it now!

The browser of choice for many, Firefox, is set for a major upgrade soon and Mozilla are attempting to set a new Guinness World Record for most downloads in a day.

Firefox 3 is set to be released on the 17th June. Why not join in the fun and help set a download record? Let’s just hope they’ve got the systems in place for this attempt.

If World records aren’t your thing, why not do it for yourself and enjoy a superior browsing experience? You know it makes sense!

A recent survey carried out in partnership between the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), reveals that in the past three years, UK Internet advertising spend has increased by £2 billion.

This growth shows no sign of abating and indicates that investment in online advertising will overtake spend on television by the end of 2009.

Read more: www.iabuk.net

In a recent article published by eMarketer (Online to Pass TV Ad Spend in UK), they have completed an excellent review of a forecast by Group M that predicts UK Internet Advertising will exceed that spent on Television advertising by 2009.

If this is true, it would make the UK the first country to see spend on online advertising overtake that spent on TV.

This is not the only forecast that has predicted the UK to be leading the pack when it comes to Internet advertising with the IAB publishing a similar forecast in October 2006.

Overall, Group M forecasts 2008 online advertising spend to be £3.4 billion with 65% coming from search.

Google are currently rolling out the new AdWords Local PlusBox which will now enable the top featured sponsored result in the Google search engine to display even more information.

This information will consist of a map, contact details, address and will even allow people to get directions. The best part is there is no extra charge for this and you will only billed by Google as normal, when someone clicks on your add and arrives at your landing page.

For local businesses looking specifically to target their particular geographical location this could prove very helpful in maximising the online visibility received.

More information can be found here at the Inside AdWords Blog

After July’s announcement Ask.com has now gone live with AskEraser their new free privacy tool which can be enabled by its users and remain active for 24 months before it will need to be activated again.

This will mean that users can ultimately surf anonymously within the ASK.com search engine. This means that Ask will stop recording the searchers search queries and cookie information (Ip address, user Id, session Id and the complete query text).

If you do use the personalisation features on Ask using AskEraser will get rid of these along with other cookies stored on your computer.

It is unsure if this move will encourage many more users to use the Ask.com search engine over competitors such as Google, Yahoo and MSN but it is a good move and shows that they are making moves to further protect users privacy.

Google is now taking minutes to index web pages instead of days according to a recent article by Manoi Jasra for Search Engine Guide. This is probably Google’s response to the fast paced blogging trends that mean content on the internet is now being updated at a much faster rate.

This goes to show that your content can be indexed and appearing in Google’s search results faster than ever which is great news for web site owners with fast moving content that want to get their news to the internet as fast as possible.

Last Thursday Google rolled out their new charts API which will allow anyone and everyone to to embed stunning dynamic charts into their web pages.

These charts were originally created for Google’s use but they have now made the technology freely available to everyone. The charts will be rendered as PNG format and are available in several different formats including:

- Line Graphs
- Pie Charts
- Bar Charts
- Scatter Plots
- Venn Diagraphs

So if you are into charts and graphs then this is an API for you!