In the past few months, everyone has taken a hit in the wallet. It seems that all my friends are trimming their budgets, skipping a night out, and looking for deals and discounts. Even a friend of mine has started collecting coupons for groceries (which I gave him grief about, until he told me how much he has saved).

Well, the internet is not any different and is in fact enabling searchers to find the discounts they so need. However, more to point, it has perked the search marketing departments of major brands such as Kraft to bid on budget-related keywords to reach this market. In a USA Today article by Theresa Howard yesterday entitled "Coupon search clicks: Sweet sound for Web marketers," she pointed out the growing trend of not only people searching for coupon and budget related terms, but also the brand names advancing their search efforts towards those terms. She writes of the increasing searches,

As consumers troll online to save money, searches that include value words such as "coupons" rose 161% in December vs. 2007 to 19.9 million and "discount" rose 26% to 7.9 million, reports tracker ComScore.

The internet has allowed for the savvy to stop sitting on carpet cutting coupons out of the Sunday paper, sorry Mom, to printing them out. Soccer moms have set up sites such as CouponMom.com to aggregate the new and best coupon deals...the term "grocery coupons" alone is a 9 million competing site term, with the term currently reaching a new search height according to the data at Google Insights.

As for brands currently taking advantage of the growing "coupon" keyword market for sponsored link bidding and searches, there are:

Kraft added "cooking on a budget" and "value" to its search and is actively promoting $1 coupons for Kraft Macaroni & Cheese.

Procter & Gamble is promoting a Crest Whitening Strips $7 coupon.

Unilever's search campaign for Bertolli's Oven Bake Meals yields a $2 coupon.

These efforts are resulting in 25 - 30% CTR for some ads and are generating the purchasing that seems to be sorely needed.