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Quote:When the economy sneezes…

Here’s the problem: while the overall search volume numbers are likely to keep climbing, the nature of those queries is likely to shift in response to macro behavioral trends. Here’s how it works: a barrage of news stories about global economic meltdown causes consumers to get nervous and rein in spending. They don’t shop as much, and even when they do, they buy fewer goods and/or shop less often. This doesn’t necessarily cause them to spend less time online (God forbid) or search any less. It just means they search for different things. So the number of purchase-related queries may decline while the number of information or entertainment-related queries increases. This, in a nutshell, is what I believe is happening right now...

Everyone gets a cold

I got my first inkling that Search wasn’t immune from the economic slowdown while reviewing the SEM campaign performance one of our consumer e-commerce clients. This client only sells one thing - a very popular and heavily branded high-end technology gadget that people love. Sales from Search had increased nicely from when we took over their campaign, but then stalled somewhat dramatically in mid-September. We couldn’t figure out why at first. But a close examination revealed at least one reason: impressions had dropped by roughly 20% over the course of the month. Uh oh...