Search marketing spend showed strong increases in the first quarter of 2008, but spending growth slowed in March, which raises some concerns heading into Q2. The findings come from a new quarterly study released today from SearchIgnite, a leading provider of search and auction based media optimization technology managing more than $300 million in paid search annually. Spend from marketers who have utilized paid search for more than one year (“Same Advertiser Spend”) was up year-over-year in Q1 across all engines by 28.5%. However, when taking a closer look at the month-over-month (“MoM”) performance within the quarter, Same Advertiser Spend growth across all engines began to decline from 47.6% in January to 33.5% in February and to 19.1% in March.

Read more about other notable findings on the state of the search landscape in the full SearchIgnite report.