Wow - scary post Online Retail Sales Stats: Consumers Buying But Spending Less - but would you expect anything different given the state of the World Economy?

The aggregate sales decline is primarily due to a decrease in average order size (AOV). Across our clients in aggregate, AOV has dropped by almost a third, from $200 to $140.

Search spending is not imune - and Alan Rimm-Kaufman further points out that -

“…The engines are displaying more ads to users, on average, before winning a paid click. If our clients are representative, the engines are earning less per click and less per impression. It is safe to assume the engines will try to regain lost revenue by increasing ad space and ad categories.“

I guess people will be wondering how Google keeps getting great results when everyone else is not - the last line explains how much control they have over the traffic on Google and how they can shift things around to make sure it’s monitized as well as it can be.