Paid search is that exclusive neighborhood of the search world where a fat wallet is all it takes to stand out at the top of the page.
Not surprisingly, that elite status has made it a prime area for massive growth from search engines, no matter how big their market share. (That means Bing offers paid options, too.)
In a recent posting on Searchengineland.com, Ginny Marvin updated readers on some of the latest developments in the paid search space. If you’re looking into this field, here are some announcements you’ll want to keep in mind.
Bing News
With the might of Microsoft behind it, Bing is trying to make inroads, and profits, in any niche it can find, especially mobile.
Earlier this year Bing upped its mobile game by offering paid product listings in an effort to keep up with Google. According to published reports, they’re also working on a mobile version for release in the near future.
Are tablets mobile devices or desktops? In the world of paid search, Google has always combined desktop and tablet numbers and, as of this year, Bing is doing the same.
Google AdWords
As the big boy in every aspect of search, both organic and paid, Google is a never-ending source of announcements that interest the web marketing world.
Product listing announcements are a huge deal in the paid search world as Google and Amazon duke it out for e-commerce supremacy. This year Google made that process easier for its customers by introducing globally available Google Shopping Campaigns.
If you were wondering how Google will expand its use of Knowledge Graph, your wait is over. Google is furthering monetizing the Knowledge Graph space by adding additional ad panels to it.
(That’s bad news for web publishers who like it when customers get information from their sites instead of from the search results page, but Google doesn’t seem to care too much about that.)
In another announcement that shows how Google is fencing off data, the company is finally extending its policy of not passing along search query data to paid search customers. This has been the policy extended towards organic search queries and Google, finally, saw the errors of its ways.
Finally
From the looks of things so far, paid search will continue to be a rapidly changing, and rapidly growing, segment of the web marketing world.