The signs of a possible economic rebound are not only leading to optimism on Main Street and Wall Street, but also Search Street.
Fueled by the positive buzz via Federal Reserve chief Ben Bernanke’s statement that the recession was “very likely over,” stocks started to rally yesterday and overnight, with significant gains by Yahoo (after its unloading of Alibaba shares for $150 Million, Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT) and smaller known search companies such as Vertro Inc (formerly Miva).
Is the Sleeping Giant of Search About to Awaken?
Basically, an economic rebound and increase in consumer spending, coupled with a decrease in consumer pricing, should lead to more advertisers utilizing Google AdWords and Microsoft AdCenter. The more advertisers open up their accounts on these search giants, the more revenue search engines bring in.
Along with an increase in PPC spending will also come a rather large opening of display advertising budgets in Q4, just in time for the holiday shopping season. Sure, we may be digging our way out of a recession right now, but any positive news is good news in today’s economic landscape, and good news for the market leads to good news in search.
Not only are the search engines seeing gains in their stock value over the past 24 hours, but also so are lesser known publishing companies which depend on contextual advertising to pay the bills. For example the little known Banks.com (BNX) has delivered a 12.5% gain this morning, which is very relevant to the increases in display advertising spending, contextual advertising powered by AdHere (a Marchex company : MCHX) and positive lead generation.
Is this a good sign for the future of search and our search marketing industry? I think so and we will see a parallel rebound in search marketing as the economy loosens up its grasp. What are your thoughts?
