The retail and travel sectors drove much of the growth in paid search, with spend from those verticals up 26% and 9% year-over-year. For retailers, this marked the fifth straight quarter of PPC spend increases.

In a somewhat surprising find, companies are spending more on email marketing (17% of online budgets) than PPC (16%), according to Econsultancy’s 2010 Email Marketing Census. However what is even more surprising is that the study found that companies are doing this despite not fully understanding their return on investment (ROI) achieved.

How can you run a successful marketing campaign if you have no idea what is working for you? In PPC it is clearer what your ROI, plus you have the ability to alter ads and landing pages based on the keyword. By doing that you can truly segment your audience to target the right message. That is what is missing in email marketing. With the data you have about your existing customers you should leverage that to segment your audience to what they want based on previous behavior.

Once companies start to realize segmenting is the key to ROI then they will see positive growth. Let’s hope they start realizing soon enough before it’s too late.

According to PPCBlog: “When you create your first AdWords campaign you feel in control. But behind the scenes, your ads show up for irrelevant keywords (a feature of “expanded broad match”). And your ads appear on websites that are unsuitable to your business (ever tried selling retirement software on MySpace?)

These extraneous impressions fleece advertisers out of billions of Dollars a year in lost profits. And they cost some advertisers so much that they give up before they really learn how AdWords works.”

Thus with all of that PPCBlog has created the Google Adwords Tax Calculator. Check it out and see how much you might be wasting.

Here is a video from YSM explaining the updates. Do you think this will make any difference to you and if you will spend more time and money advertising with them?

The general picture of the beta is if you’re running a PPC ad in Google, and you’re in the top position, you can click on a plus sign next to (the name you give your contact form) and Google will drop down your contact form to be submitted right there in the Google search results.

After the form has been filled out, Google will send you an email with a “form lead ID” and other requested information. Google will give you a Google phone number to call, you then enter in the lead ID and Google will redirect the call to the phone number left by the customer.

The special ads only will show up in the number one position, with a plus sign. Advertisers will pay a maximum CPC for each lead submitted.

Interesting stuff coming from Google. This will most likely lead to more and more types of forms such as email and live chat leads as well. Stay posted.