The drop in AdWord clicks over the past two months has created a bump Google's ongoing success. But not to worry, CEO Eric Schmidt told Business Week, people will eventually pay more for the better quality clicks.

There has been a lot of press about this lately. I think "Google's Gamble" as Business Week called it may be expecting too much. If the cost of their clicks continues to increase through their minimum bid and Quality Score push people may start using Yahoo and Microsoft first.

While their popularity will continue to give them the high volume of traffic, if Yahoo and Microsoft offer lower CPA (cost per acquisition) then the strategy of starting with Google because of that could be changed to get the lower costing conversions first and then test the successful ones over at Google.

If this happens then the edge Google has could drop. It is one thing to be the popular search engine for users, but if they lose their position as the popular engine for advertisers then they are almost back to the days when they had no idea how to monetize their engine.

Obviously in some cases where there is a big enough margin in what is being marketed advertisers will buy the more expensive clicks. But in the case of companies selling small margin items such a move will make it difficult.

Apart from the Quality Score influence, this move suggests Google is using information they are getting from Google Analytics to determine if people will pay more. This is a dangerous step for a number of reasons - one, the privacy issues could be a problems and stop this and two, many people using GA may not be doing so effectively, measuring the wrong thing and thus giving Google information that they use but is not real.

We will all have to wait and see if their hopes are founded.

When Google raised concerns over a possible Microsoft-Yahoo merger, it may have just been the pot calling the kettle black. According to new stats released by Attributor, Google's acquisition of DoubleClick gives them a whopping 69% of the online advertising market share. This comes in the wake of news that Google saw 59.2 percent of all US searches in February.

Furthermore, DoubleClick has 48% share of sites with 1 million unique visitors per month, while Google enjoys a whopping 71.38% share of sites with less than 100,000 unique visitors per month.

MSN has a lot of work to do if it wants to catch Google, as Steve Ballmer has declared in recent months. Currently, they only have 9.86% of the total market share. Even adding Yahoo, with an 11.54% market share, they will only come in at 21.4%.

Attributor also shared telling statistics for content distribution. For every article Attributor tracks, there are an average of 20 copies published. 57% of copies do not contain links back to the author, and 64% of copies have ads on them. Most copies are published on sites with less than 1 million unique visitors.

Attributor analyzed 68 million domains for their ad-server crawls and compared it with unique user data from Compete.com.

Full-service digital marketing agency Geary Interactive has acquired Fathom Online, a search engine marketing firm. Though Geary already offered search marketing services, the company says it will expand it demographic reach as a result of the merger.

Geary CEO Andreas Roell said, "The combination of Geary and Fathom Online provides a compelling platform for today's digital marketing landscape. Together, we offer powerful capabilities and deep relationships with publishers and engines, expanded end-to-end customized marketing solutions, a national presence and extensive industry category experience."

The acquisition also highlights the need for integrating SEM campaigns with a larger online marketing strategy.

"Search engine tactics are the most popular element of a digital marketing campaign. In order to effectively generate search demand and convert customers' search clicks, the campaign must also include a strong integration with web development, paid and organic digital media planning and data analytics," said Roell.