U.S. Paid Search Market Continues To Grow: Google Leads, Bing-Yahoo Competes

SearchIgnite, a provider of paid search optimization solutions which claims to manage more than $600 million in pay-per-click (PPC) spend annually, has released its latest report on the paid search market in the United States. According to the company, spend on paid search ads increased close to 6% year-over-year.

Google commanded no less than 80.2% of all U.S. PPC ad spend in the third quarter, picking up 2 percentage points even compared to last quarter.

And yet, SearchIgnite says early data coming out of the Bing-Yahoo alliance bodes well for Bing to become a viable competitor in the future.

Paid search spend in in the U.S. in the third quarter increased 5.8% year-over-year, compared with flat growth a year ago, adds SearchIgnite.

Month-over-month shows that the growth is picking up, which bodes well for a strong Q4: July grew 4.9%, August 5.8% and September 6.7%.

According to SearchIgnite, PPC ads delivered by Bing show little cost-per-click inflation thus far (something many in the industry feared), and the company doesn’t expect them to markedly inflate in the future either.

In addition, click-through rates have increased for ads served on the combined Bing-Yahoo search inventory, which suggest Bing’s ad serving system delivers more relevant advertising units to users than Yahoo.

The report tracked more than 55 billion impressions and more than 1 billion clicks on Google, Yahoo and MSN/Bing from January 1, 2006 through September 30, 2010.