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Last week, Google launched Google Merchant Search. This week, Edward Cowell, Director of digital marketing agency Guava; says, ““Google Merchant Search will truly put the cat amongst pigeons for some of Google’s biggest search advertisers, the financial services comparison websites.”

Price comparison websites are big business in the UK and all the major industry players
advertise heavily on Google. Research by Resolution Foundation shows that 45% of UK adults used a comparison site to help them make a financial decision in the last year and that the price-comparison market is estimated to be growing at 30% a year.

That’s why the launch of the new service comes at a critical time for Google and its financial services advertisers. Says Cowell, “Most big financial services websites are just coming to terms with a marked increase in their paid search advertising budgets due to the recent changes in Google’s trademark bidding policies, so Merchant Search could be rubbing salt into the wound.”

Sites such as Ebay have boycotted Google Adwords by withdrawing its adverting when Google attempted to encroach on PayPal’s territory. So, uprisings are not unheard of in the search arena.

That’s why Cowell and the rest of the industry is waiting to see how the price comparisons companies react to the launch of Merchant Search.

The old saying goes that it’s not about quantity, but quality. Can that be true for search marketing as well? Microsoft is hoping that new tools it’s launching today at Search Engine Strategies Chicago will allow advertisers and webmasters to make the most of limited traffic.
In today’s SearchDay, “Microsoft Adds More Tools for Search [...]

According to the latest Click Fraud Index report from Click Forensics, the overall industry average pay-per-click fraud rose to 15.8 percent for the second quarter of 2007. This is an increase from 14.1 percent for the same quarter in 2006 and 14.8 percent for Q1 2007.
On content networks, such as Google AdSense and the Yahoo [...]

Click Forensics has released pay-per-click (PPC) fraud figures for the second quarter of 2007.

The overall average click fraud rate was 15.8 percent for the second quarter of 2007. This was an increase from 14.1 percent in 2006 and 14.8 percent for the first quarter of 2007.
The average click fraud rate of PPC advertisements on search [...]

comScore and SEMDirector said today that they have entered into a joint marketing initiative to offer a new set of analytic solutions for managing large paid and organic search advertising programs.

SEMDirector will use comScore’s qSearch data to measure search activity and provide analysis to the search advertising market. SEMDirector will use comScore’s data to enhance [...]