In this economic contingency, there is no such area that is not affected by the financial shakeout. How can Search Engine Marketing be left out? The effects are ofcourse, negative. According to The Wall Street Journal SEM weakened 8 percent in Q4 2008.

'Advertisers who spend less than $50,000 on search ads cut their spending by 23% year-over-year, while advertisers that spend more than $200,000 on search per month cut spending by 9% during that time. Purchases by advertisers who spend between $50,000 and $200,000 were relatively flat.'

This toolbar will allow the user to display some of the basic key performance indicators.

These performance indicators would be displayed at the bottom of the browser.

This is what the semvironment blog has to say on the issue:

• Double Click this toolbar for your stats to update – it may take 60 seconds to update depending on the size of your account. The data you see will be for today only.

At the Yahoo! Search Marketing Blog, Noah Belson of the Yahoo! Content Quality Analysis team has posted what is to be described as a detailed definition of a good click-through rate.

It is a well known fact that, the click-through rates are campaign dependent and the results vary from campaign to campaign. The CTR is also keyword dependent, meaning that every campaign's CTR would differ and would be entirely dependent on the keywords used. The placing and the rating of your advertisement also directly affect your click through rate.

A recent study by Clickforensics revealed that the Click fraud phenomenon showed a hike of 15% this year compared to the last year. Not only the increase, but the trend too is alarming.

Apparently, this type of a cyber fraud can be found all over the world but in some countries it is rampant. India ranks at number one by contributing 4.3 percent, followed by Germany with 3.9 percent and South Korea with 3.7 percent, as the Clickforensics study reveals.

Goliath Google's latest SEC filing points to a possibility that its future revenues could be hurt while trying to contain "accidental clicks" on Web advertising. The effect could be felt on Google’s near-term advertising revenues.

Won't it be just wonderful that every click that we get on our sites would turns into a customer. Afterall we work hard only to get more customers. Every visitor is a potential customer, so it is important that every click that we get must turn into a customer.

But 'how' that is the question. YSM here has offered ten landing page tips to turn your visitors into customers:

As spending in the search marketing industry is on the rise, so are the click frauds and at rates which by no measures can be called as small, reports Click Forensics. Every time the results are made known it shows the deteriorating state of affairs in the SEM as far as click fraud is concerned, see: Click Fraud On The Rise: Click Forensics Findings.

The report from Ad Age published recently, reveals some eye-popping facts and figures about search marketing. You can read the complete report in PDF titled searchfactpack2007.pdf here.

There are a couple of interesting findings that the report brings to light:

Ask has announced the launch of the new PPC platform on 2nd October. The news came in the limelight after a blog posted at SearchEngineWatch.

There is an interesting article published by Forbes that highlights the ever increasing concern regarding click fraud. Shuman Ghosemajumder, Google's click fraud czar on this occasion says that Google is throwing out less than 10% clicks to accommodate any invalid clicks so that advertisers are not billed for these fraudulent clicks. He explains: