Paid Search Engine Traffic Steadily Going Down

Well that's no real surprise is it? The point about how much money big companies are spending on paid search marketing. There comes a certain that you have to think why spend even a penny on paid search traffic? For example if you want to find something at a big brand store like Sears are you going to go to a search engine to find those stores? Nope you are going to type in homedepot.com just like everyone else.These are big name companies that have gone beyond the flood zone of dominating the internet marketing scene with their popularity of brand names. Especially in a recession like we are in right now I would be very surprise if any of the big nationally know companies are spending any marketing budgets on paid search traffic. Which to me leads to the more obvious point as to why the amount of money spent on search engine marketing is down as much as it is. Large companies and gotten smarter and realized that they can allocate their marketing dollars on things that are more cost effective.So why did I point this out? That article that I was reading came across as another one of those negative propaganda headlines that the economy is squashing all these businesses. Enough already for goodness sakes we get it, the economy is in a mess we know! To me I just thought that the more obvious reason as to why paid search traffic revenue is so down is probably because some of the standard big spenders in the past have gotten smarter and figured out that they get the same results for the most part with out having to pay for their search engine traffic because they have gone beyond that tipping point like I said and their websites are known on a national level. Why waste good money on something that everyone know by now like your website. Bigger companies should not be spending budgets on stuff like that and that after all is good business sense.