SMB PPC Ad Spend Not Looking Good: Palore

Noa Gertin at Palore just pinged me with some real happy talk kind of news.  According to their data, which they get from crawling local search sites, the search engine advertising spend for SMBs took a 50%+ hit in Sept/Oct 2008.  Noa, if you’re reading this, how do you know this is SMB spend and not just overall ad spend?  (e.g. if a few big brands which make up a nice chunk of overall spend cut their budgets, it could make it look worse than it is for SMBs if you are not breaking them out)

And here’s an eerily similar graph of NASDAQ performance to really cheer you up.