Small businesses continue to increase their search spending over last year for Q2 2010, according to the “State of Small Business Online Advertising Q2 2010” report from WebVisible.
Compared to Q2 2009, overall clicks across all search engines have increased. However, spending shifted toward Yahoo! and away from Google and Ask, while Microsoft’s Bing remained flat
Paid search conversions were substantially up, both on annual and quarterly basis. Nearly half of all (43.3%) clicks resulted in a website conversion and 6.9% in a phone call.
In addition, conversion activity was up across a variety of goals – including video views, form fills, printing driving directions and bookmarking.
Search ad spending in Q2 2010 by small businesses increased both on quarterly (1.4%) and yearly basis (159%). The average amount spent on search advertising was $2,231. Small businesses also continued to raise the number of keywords they purchased.