Last week’s craze over Twitter and Iran was the height of media buzzdom. Democracy + social media + possible election fraud = PR Gold. The State Department asking Twitter to delay server maintenance? A former National Security Advisor honcho suggesting Twitter should get the Nobel Prize?! That’s so good, even the craziest novelist couldn’t make it up.

But what was really happening in Iran and on Twitter? Some sobering thoughts suggest that Twitter may not have been that widely embraced inside Iran. Other reports suggest that the government has been actively suppressing digital resistance.

Meanwhile, a few terrifying and sad reports have leaked out, like protest violence photos and the Neda video, displaying the immediacy and emotional impact of social media.

Outside Iran, these scant bits have whipped the disenfranchised Diaspora and simpatico millions to take to the streets and social media streams. Starved for the latest and eager to commune, they have pollinated the web with millions of bits of Iran Election information – on leading search engines, news sites, wikis, social networks, sharing services and real time search engines.

Taking a web-wide view, Compete looked at searchers on “Iran+Election” at over 25 sites like Google, the New York Times, Wikipedia, Facebook, YouTube, real-time search startup OneRiot and, of course, Twitter.

It’s no surprise that Twitter claimed 55% of searchers the week after the Election, given all the media hoopla. But note that Google was the leading search property in the days leading up to the event, the day itself and the day after. Searchers used Google to learn more about the event before it happened and Twitter to get the latest on the fallout.

As OneRiot has written about, there’s a bit of an outstanding question among Google, Twitter and others: who will win real time search?

Search doesn’t equate to media consumption. With Iran in the headlines on nytimes.com and streaming down Twitter apps as #IranElection, people don’t need to search for the latest. But many will search nonetheless, especially the highly engaged.

The summer movie blockbuster season is just about here, with major new releases set to hit theaters in the next couple weeks. Studies show that advertising support can break or make a blockbuster in the lead up to opening night.

On the web, movie advertisers love big, bold banners on popular movie sites like Yahoo! Movies, Fandango and MySpace. Here at Compete, we’ve got an eye on the MySpace homepage and saw some great looking creative in May.

In a recent post, we saw how 72% of MySpace visitors saw the homepage – the crown jewel in MySpace’s strategy to sell advertising like portals. That’s a huge volume of impressions, but how valuable are they really?

To get a better sense, we looked at same day viewthrough or the rate at which ad-exposed unique visitors visited the movie page.

Terminator Salvation clearly kicked MySpace movie ad butt! At 0.80% Viewthrough, Terminator outperformed the average by 2.7x.

Fractions of a percent may not seem like much, but keep in mind that MySpace had nearly 57 million unique visitors last month – that translates to tens of thousands of ad viewthroughs everyday.

Some fans just can’t get enough. We also took a look at those MySpace users who saw a movie ad and decided to do a little research.

Ah, the Trekkies. Of course, geekdom went crazy when Star Trek came to the silver screen last month. MySpace geeks (not an oxymoron) were no exception, with .11% of ad exposed visitors also heading warp speed over to IMDB.

As the biggest movie research site on the net, it’s not exactly, “Going boldy where no man has gone before.” But with at 3.2x the average for other movies on MySpace in May, it certainly got us thinking…

What if both winners joined up for a sequel? “Terminator Trekkers.” Now that’s one movie that MySpacers would pay to see!

Unless you’re completely new to the internet industry, or have been on vacation for the past two weeks, you’ve probably heard a lot about Bing, Microsoft’s slick new search engine.

On June 1st, Microsoft officially launched Bing with $100M ad campaign, including TV commercials, and started redirecting traffic from Live Search and vertical search engines like Farecast over to Bing.com.

So how’s it going? At first glance, not too bad.

One week since launching, Bing has raised Microsoft’s searcher penetration by 2.3ppts to 11.4%.

We trended the daily change in searcher penetration over the past week to show how marketing and buzz around the Bing launch has greatly extended the reach it inherited from MSN/Live.

A 2.3ppt improvement on a 9.1% penetration base is impressive. Yet this uptick hasn’t come at the expense of Google or Yahoo!, which have maintained searcher penetration since Bing’s launch.

New searchers are exploring Bing, but they haven’t forsaken their preferred engines and made the switch completely.

That’s also evident in a critical engagement metric: queries per searcher. Bing has significantly dropped Microsoft’s average queries per searcher since launch.

Prior to Bing’s launch, Microsoft maintained an average 5.2 queries per searcher. Since Bing’s launch, the average has dropped by 1.3 queries or 25%, with millions dropping by just to perform a couple of trial queries.

Those trial searchers haven’t produced significant enough volume to impact the established market share of the top engines, which account for more than 12 billion queries, according to Compete’s panel.

Since Bing’s launch, the average daily market share of the top engines has remained essentially unchanged. If anything, the day of week fluctuations in Google’s massive query base has overshadowed Microsoft’s uptick from Bing’s launch.

So Bing has had great success in attracting new searchers, but these have been dabblers that have not given up on their old engines (yet) and not generated enough queries to move the needle.

In the coming weeks, we’ll be watching Bing to see where these dabblers are coming from (Google? Yahoo!?) and, critically, if they will return to Bing for more than just a trial run.

Last month, we posted on how paid clicks (or “sponsored referrals,” to be a bit more precise) dropped precipitously on economic concerns and improved targeting. I received a couple of inquiries about what exactly this meant, so I’d like to take a quick minute and explain.

First, Compete uses the term “referrals” instead of clicks because we track both queries and referrals. You click your mouse twice when you search: once on the search bar and once on the result. (Yes, you can also press enter, but that still makes a clicking noise, at least on my keyboard.) We think of the first click as a query and the second as a referral.

Then, as most people know, there are two types of referrals: sponsored vs. natural. (Also known as paid vs. algorithmic.) Sponsored referrals are how search engines make most of their money.

So, the rate of sponsored referrals (=sponsored/total) is probably the second or third most important search metric, after volume and share of queries. (That’s from the competitive perspective we take here in the Search Market Share series. If you’re talking user experience, search fulfillment would be a better metric.)

To reflect that importance, we’ve added some data to our monthly Market Share data. Now the Sponsored Referrals section includes the rate from a Year Prior.

As you can see, Sponsored Referrals look very different than a year ago. Last month, Google’s rate of Sponsored Referrals maintained 6.2%, which was down from 6.8% vs. a year ago.

Theories abound for why this took place. Some argue that Google has become better at targeting which Sponsored Results appear after a query, and is thus able to charge more per referral while serving less ads. Others claim that marketers have scaled back due to the economy and the ad inventory simply isn’t there.

The argument for the latter certainly looks to be true when we take a look at a trended rate of Sponsored Referrals over the past 12 months. Note the big spike and drop-off for Google, Yahoo! and MSN before and after the holiday shopping season, when search marketers spend most heavily.

MSN/Live’s Sponsored Referrals also slipped a bit last month, falling to 3.1%. Since MSN/Live transformed into Bing on June 1st (we’ll post more on Bing’s launch tomorrow) early tests show that Bing is better at attracting eyeballs to search ads than Google. In the coming months, we’ll see how Bing performs on Sponsored Referrals in Compete’s behavioral data.

Finally, not much changed in May in terms of query volume and share, so I hope no one missed our usual Market Share coverage. Not to worry, we’ll be back next month to cover Share changes, with special attention for Bing.

The biggest day of the year for the flower industry is Mother’s Day. As a follow up to our study of Valentine’s Day advertising, we took a look at homepage ads that ran ahead of this crucial holiday, when weekly traffic to major flower retailer sites can shoot up as much as 500%.

Once again, 1800Flowers.com and ProFlowers.com took out full-day banner ads on the AOL.com, MSN.com and Yahoo.com homepages. As Ad Age’s Michael Learmonth has written, homepage ad campaigns are “national in scope, approach the reach of TV ad campaigns and are high-impact and expensive.”

Clearly ProFlowers was the winner in this head-to-head match up on viewthrough and conversion… but what about homepage visitors who saw a ProFlowers ad, but didn’t end up buying there?

A homepage visitor may have seen a ProFlowers ad, visited the site and then decided to shop around for a better deal. This kind of online cross-shopping is especially common in commodity categories like flower retailing and is evident in the search queries conducted after an ad exposure.

Also, sometimes ad viewers unconsciously register ad impressions and attribute them to the advertiser’s competitor. This is especially true if the ad viewer is loyal to the competitor or if the competitor has other ads in-market or a stronger brand.

In either case, cross-shopping or miss-attribution, the advertiser loses out on a potential sale.

The charts above shows purchases made by 1-800-Flowers and ProFlowers ad exposed groups. We kept the groups mutually exclusive to ensure that viewers of one homepage ad were not influenced by the other.

It shows a surprising data point: ProFlowers came up winning more purchases than any other flower retailer – even more than 1-800-Flowers ad viewers who did not see a ProFlowers ad!

That’s incredible given the cost of homepage ads (upwards of hundreds of thousands of dollars for a single day) and makes me hope, for 1-800-Flowers’ sake, that ProFlowers ran a lot of other ads, not just on portal homepages.

Also surprising: even though it won more purchases than any other flower retailer, ProFlowers still captured less than 50% of purchases from homepage visitors exposed to their ads. FTD took a full quarter of purchases made by ProFlower’s ad viewers and 1-800-Flowers took another 22%.

That means that despite everything ProFlowers does well, from a huge ad budget to dynamic landing pages to an optimized conversion funnel, they still lose out on a significant share of interest that they originated. What can ProFlowers do to counteract? For one, take a closer look at their cross-shopping customers. Who knew Mother’s Day could be so cut-throat?

To read up on the latest trends in advertising effectiveness, visit blog.compete.com/adimpact. To contact us regarding custom research project for your advertising or publishing, visit www.compete.com/adimpact or email us at adimpact@compete.com.

American Idol fans doubled down in Adam Lambert searches as the “glam-rock sex god” delivered one hit performance after another last month. Lambert’s query share grew to over 1.3 million queries as fans flocked to see his “leather and spandex glory.”

Earth Day was April’s other top mover – skyrocketing nearly seven-fold to 800k searches. Earth Day also improved share by .006% — no small feat given April’s 13+ billion queries.

Rounding out the rest of the list were the familiar signs of Spring with the MLB, Kentucky Derby and Mother’s Day all taking terms in the top slots.

Last month, searchers also said goodbye to Natasha Richardson, the English actress who died tragically in a ski accident. Her death captured enormous media and popular attention, reaching 4.7 million queries in March. Searchers also moved on after The Bachelor season ended with another happy long-term couple. Queries for the show fell from 1.4 million to 40k.

The Watchman movie, NCAA March Madness and AIG rounded out the list of search terms that lost the public’s interest in April.