IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau) released their Internet Advertising Report for the first half of 2008 this week. It shows online advertising spending increased 15.2% in the first half of 2008 versus the same period in 2007.

Couple of interesting charts from IAB (dollar figures are in millions):

1. Advertising Formats: search and video growing at the expense of classifieds and sponsorships.

2. Pricing Models: performance deals growing at CPM's expense. That makes sense as advertisers demand more accountability for their ad budgets. More and more advertisers want to pay for action or clicks instead of just impressions.

Here's a copy of the full IAB Internet Advertising Report 2008 Q2 (pdf).

A new version (6.5) of the downloadable AdWords Editor has been released by Google. This version introduces the Keyword Opportunities tool that helps you generate ideas for search keywords to target.

If you're an existing user, you will be prompted to auto-upgrade (your campaigns, ad groups, settings, etc will be retained). If you buy ads on Google AdWords but aren't using AdWords Editor yet, you can download AdWords Editor 6.5 here (17 Mb).

AdWords Editor is a downloadable program you can use to manage your AdWords campaigns instead of going to the website to make your changes. Its biggest advantage over the Web based version is that it's a lot faster. That's a big boon to businesses that manage large campaigns with a ton of keywords and lots of ads, landing pages, etc.

A look at the new Keyword Opportunities feature and screenshots after the jump...