Sunnyvale, Calif.—Significant increases in ad budgets in the retail and financial verticals drove overall search spending up by 20% in the third quarter compared with the year-earlier period, according to a study conducted by search engine marketing technology company Efficient Frontier.
The company's “Global Digital Marketing Performance Report” also reported that the third quarter saw Google gaining paid search spending share, boosted most significantly by its 78.3% share of search ad spending for automobile searches, versus 74.6% in the third quarter of 2010. Efficient Frontier attributed this to Google's improving click-through rates and to marketers' seeking a greater volume of search queries.
Efficient Frontier's report was based on an analysis of the company's customer index, a sample of large-scale U.S. search engine advertisers across multiple sectors.
