The Bing and Yahoo merger will now make it more worthwhile for businesses to run PPC advertising across all three major search engines.

Search engine advertisers improved their ROI (Return on Investment) by 25% during the first three months of 2009

Since Google started allowing bidding on other brands names, cost per click on Adwords has climbed and click through rates have dropped.

Online shoppers have been hunting for bargains online on Christmas Day, so ecommerce sites should leave their PPC ads running to capture highly motivated consumers during the holiday.

Online retailers have seen an increase while less people are buying offline this Christmas. More people are also looking for discounts and voucher codes.

Google has changed its policy on online gambling ads in Adwords. From 17th October 2008 UK businesses can register new accounts to bid on gambling-related keywords.

Yahoo Search Marketing will no longer have a fixed minimum bid in order to help with the integration of Google ads into the Yahoo paid search results. This will be good for keywords that perform well.

The Google AdWords keyword tool is now providing approximate search volumes for keywords which will help when choosing good keywords for PPC and for SEO.

Google continues to dominate the market in search with eBay, Yahoo, MSN and Ask struggling for second. Facebook has made gains, showing the strength of social media.

Choosing very specific keywords for your PPC campaign can often bring more sales than choosing very generic terms because it means customers are ready to make a purchase.