Image by atomische via Flickr.

For marketers in the digital space, 2009 was a whirlwind year. Twitter took off amid a social surge, Yahoo! and Microsoft partnered up in search and Google gobbled up a litany of companies. During this time we’ve used our blog to cut through the headlines and share insights into what the year’s top stories mean for marketers. Look to Digital Connections for more of this in 2010.

Below you’ll find our most widely-read posts of the year (we’ve recently counted down the top five on Twitter, for those of you who follow us there).

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Google recently introduced new search ad formats, including Visual Elements (e.g. movie trailers), Sitelinks, Location Extensions, Product Extensions and Comparison Ads. In this post I’ll look at each offering first as a search marketer and then as a consumer focused solely on my specific searches within the Google engine. Of course, when people have a good search experience, it almost invariably means good things for marketers as well.

Visual Elements

What it is: The Visual Elements feature is a hidden extension of the traditional text ad triggered by clicking a plus box.

Marketer Benefit: This is a great fit for a media/entertainment brand or anyone trying to drive awareness, as long as they do not mind if users don’t visit their actual site. If you are looking to drive revenue efficiently, this product may not be the best fit for you. However, it’s worth testing if you have a compelling video or another visual element — especially if you can include a strong call to action. Marketers pay on a CPC basis, either for a click on the link or the plus box, but the advertiser will not be charged twice.

Consumer Benefit: Since the visual element is hidden until the user activates, the placement has the benefit of a rich media ad without being obtrusive. This type of advertisement can add to the search experience – instead of detracting from it.

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SearchIgnite, leading search optimization solutions provider and 360i sister company, recently released a whitepaper outlining key trends in retail ad spend in Q4. The company, which manages more than $400 million in paid search annually, drew data from its large pool of sophisticated retail advertisers.

Research showed that multi-channel retailers are increasing their U.S. paid search initiatives despite economic uncertainty, with spend up 7 percent in Q4 ahead of Black Friday. Each of the Big Three engines showed year-over-year spend increases from retailers, but Bing’s 47 percent boost represented the greatest gain. This was likely due to higher average order values (“AOV”) from shoppers converting on Microsoft’s engine.

Here are some of SearchIgnite’s key findings:

• Strong U.S. Retail Spend in First Half of Q4: U.S. search spend from existing retail marketers is up 7% YoY in the first half of Q4 across all major search engines (Google, Yahoo! and Bing).
• Conversion Rates on the Rise: In the first half of Q4, conversion rates were up 17%, a strong increase over this time last year and a hopeful sign that consumer confidence is on the rise.
• Retailers Increase Spend on Bing: U.S. retail marketers dramatically increased their search spend on Bing, up 47% YoY, seeing higher AOV from shoppers on Microsoft’s engine.

The full report is available for download at http://www.searchignite.com/about_research.aspx.

One way to effectively mix SEO and PPC: Stay ahead of the curve and utilize new innovations that enable you to weave micro-formats and RSS feeds into search listings.

In an iMedia Connection article published today, Mike Dobbs — Group Director, SEO at 360i — outlines 10 tips for combining SEO & paid search in your digital marketing programs. We’ve provided a brief summary below, but you can read the full article over on iMedia’s Web site.

While search engine optimization (SEO) and paid search are often seen as independent processes by digital marketers, the consumer sees a search results page as a single experience, and research shows that paid and natural search do impact eachother. Here’s a look at 10 key force-multipliers that leverage search results pages to maximize the impact of both your PPC and SEO efforts:

1. Follow proven SEO best practices
There are many standard best practices, but avoiding duplicate content is a vital SEO rule for retailers. Duplicate content is a term used in the field of search engine optimization to describe content that appears on more than one webpage. Embracing the “canonical tag” is an elegant solution for avoiding duplicate content.

2. Evaluate your paid search campaign structure against your own site architecture
Following your site’s architecture when setting up your campaigns and ad groups can help reveal untapped opportunities for your paid search efforts. Do you have an ad group for each of your product categories and promotions? Walk through your site map and compare it against your PPC campaign to make sure you cover all the bases.

3. Take a holistic approach to PPC bidding and ad creative
Running paid ads that include timely promotions and a call-to-action alongside natural search results for your brand can actually increase overall click-through rates (CTRs) on natural search listings, providing higher ROI across your search efforts.

Results of a SearchIgnite study showed that natural search clicks were 17 percent higher on days when paid search ads were running, garnering more “free” clicks simply by running paid search ads alongside natural search results. In addition, total conversions and revenue on both paid and natural terms dramatically increased on days when paid search ads were running.

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Read our complete POV on the Microsoft-Yahoo deal below, or download a PDF version via Scribd (above).

Microsoft is effectively acquiring Yahoo’s search business, migrating Yahoo’s search ad customers to its adCenter platform, and licensing Bing’s search platform back to Yahoo. Yahoo will become the worldwide sales organization for the companies’ premium search advertisers, while from an ad technology perspective adCenter will be the search ad platform and Yahoo’s Panama will be phased out. Smaller advertisers will use adCenter directly to purchase their search advertising. After the deal goes into effect, both the natural and paid results on Yahoo’s owned and operated properties will come from Bing’s search platform.

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