Google Dominates Search Advertising With 80% Market Share Unaffected By The Rise Of Bing

Although its display ad revenue is expected to grow at a healthy pace to $1 billion in 2011, Google is still mostly all about search and in particular search advertising. Market researcher eMarketer estimates that Google’s net US search advertising revenue will grow 38.9% to $10.92 billion in 2011, which pushes Google’s overall share of the paid search market to almost 80%. These number do not include mobile advertising search, a market segment Google dominates with an almost 98% share. It therefore does not come as a surprise that this has grabbed the attention of the US Federal Trade Commission, which has announced it is reviewing Google’s dominant position in the search advertising market.

eMarketer found that the rise of social media network advertising, and notably Facebook’s self-serve Facebook Ads program, is not taking any money away from search advertising. This is mostly due to the fact that most medium and small businesses are focused on direct response advertising for which paid search has proven to be highly effective. Brand marketers increasingly see value in search advertising, because they start to see the relationship between search and display advertising and how search can increase brand awareness, even offline. It seems that the Microsoft-Yahoo search alliance deal has not helped Yahoo much and that Google is the primary beneficiary of this deal, steadily gaining market share as the alliance’s combined share has remained relatively flat. Source