Fairfax Digital and Melbourne IT have combined to form a new joint venture called Advantate, designed to give the SME market in Australia and New Zealand simple, cost-effective access to search engine marketing services.

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courtesy: www.attentiongrabbers.co.uk

Advantate is designed to provide SMEs with a single point of access to search engine marketing services from a range of leading providers including Google, Yahoo Search Marketing, Ninemsn and Fairfax Digital networks. The company will initially focus on reselling pay per click (PPC) advertising, and will manage these PPC campaigns on behalf of its SME customers.

According to IAB Australia’s Online Advertising Expenditure Report released in February 2008 by PricewaterhouseCoopers, online advertising in Australia for the 12 months to December 2007 was worth almost $1.3b, with year on year growth of 34.5 per cent. Search marketing and directories advertising experienced more than 56 per cent growth for the same period, to $622m.  

Advantate is expected to launch its services by the end of May 2008.