After a successful set of masterclasses at last year's Technology For Marketing & Advertising (TFM&A) event, Google has confirmed it will host 2 sessions at the 2010 show, featuring tips on driving online performance using tools like AdWords, mobile advertising and Google Analytics. The event, targeted at marketing, media and advertising professionals, is happening in London's Earls Court from 23-24 February.

Gilli Goodman, Google UK drug specialist, will give an overview of how Google Analytics can help businesses during her masterclass, outlining how the tool provides the information needed to write better ads, strengthen marketing initiatives and create higher-converting websites.

Sarah Speake, mobile sales and technology director at Google UK, will host a session entitled "The future is mobile", looking at the future of mobile products and advertising at Google. Developments in smartphones and the rapid growth of the Android operating system will be covered in the session.

"Find out about Google's mobile advertising products in search, display and local and learn strategies and best practice for developing mobile sites and campaigns," she urges.

YouTube will also be represented at this year's event, with a discussion entitled "Brands on Film: The video explosion is on!"

The deal between Microsoft and Yahoo! announced last July, whereby Bing owner Microsoft will power Yahoo!'s search engine, comes to fruition this year and, ahead of the development, online marketing specialists are being reminded that website content will remain among their most pertinent considerations.

Since both Bing and rival search engine Google weigh up a wide range of website content when it comes to ranking sites, businesses should factor web pages, documents, mash-ups, videos and images into their search engine optimisation (SEO) campaigns, digital marketing and SEO specialist Mike Dobbs tells Search Engine Land.

"These are just a few avenues marketers can leverage to more proactively communicate with search engines to increase visibility, relevance and search display," he observes. He also recommends utilising Google and Bing's webmaster tools and investing in website analytics to track the success of a given online marketing campaign.

The roll-out of Google Caffeine has been cited as further reason for prioritising the inclusion of regular, unique website content as the wider search market evolves.

An algorithmic change focusing on more real-time search results and incorporating social networks like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, Caffeine is expected to push older web pages down rankings as the search engine allocates greater prominence to news and real-time information like social media updates and online video.

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Search is becoming one of the most important ingredients in the marketing mix according to the latest IPA/BDO Bellwether survey, which was released this week. It shows that search marketing accounted for nearly half of all advertising spend in the last 3 months of 2009.

Although the survey highlights that overall advertising spend dipped by seven per cent during last year's final quarter, spending on online advertising grew by 11.5 per cent. Display ads had a market share of just over a fifth, while classified ads accounted for ten per cent of online advertising spend.

Marketing budgets for this year have been set higher, on average, compared to 2009 spend, with the survey prompting analysts to single out direct and digital marketing activities as leaders in the recovery of the sector.

"Unsurprisingly, companies are continuing to seek cost-effective and flexible options where the return on investment can be measured," remarked Andy Viner, head of media at accountancy group BDO.

Matt Simpson, digital media group chairman at advertsing body the IPA, added: "The continued fast pace of development in targeting and measurement capabilities across online channels has definitely helped advertisers reduce the risk of their marketing spends."