ReadWriteWeb

Unlike Johnny Carson's Carnac character (pictured at left), there are serious and legitimate ways to predict how your traffic will respond to your site's content. A new service from Adobe's SearchCenter+ and features from the existing service from Visual Revenue are both trying to be more helpful in optimizing your content and ad buys for your site. Both services can boost your traffic by a 25% or more, which is a welcome note for just about everyone concerned with their site stats these days.

Back in May, we mentioned that Boulder startup Trada - a crowdsourced solution for creating keyword-based pay-per-click (PPC) ad campaigns - had introduced support for Microsoft's Bing search engine. Today, Trada is getting a huge leg-up from Bing's competition as Google Ventures has invested over $4 million, leading the company's latest round of funding. Joining Google in the Series C round is Foundry Group, whose $1.5M investment mark's the Bouler firms third investment with Trada.

During my time in Boulder last week, one of the more interesting startups I was introduced to was Trada, a virtual marketplace for pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. Using Trada, advertisers and agencies looking to take advantage of search engine ad networks can crowdsource the development of keyword-based ads to the service's growing number of paid search optimizers. Previously, ads through Trada were only available on Google and Yahoo, but this morning, the startup has announced support for Bing and Microsoft adCenter.

Since the launch of Bing, watching the developments in the search engine market is finally interesting again. According to the latest data from Compete for July, Bing continues to grow slowly but surely. At the same time, though, Compete notes that Bing has not been able to convert its growing search share into a rise in paid clicks on ads on the site. In July, Bing's sponsored click rate fell slightly to 5.5%, even though in June, it still saw an impressive growth in paid clicks.

According to the latest data from Hitwise, paid search traffic has taken a major hit in the last year. While, according to Hitwise, about 9.84% of the search engine traffic it registered in April 2008 came from paid clicks, in the four weeks preceding May 9, 2009, this number declined by 26% to 7.25%. Hitwise registered this trend across all of the categories it tracks, with the sole exception of paid traffic to site in its education category, where paid search results increased slights from 1.39% to 1.45%.