For the first time in two years, Yahoo has grown the percentage of spend from major tech advertisers in North America and Asia-Pacific (APAC) at the expense of Google, according to Covario’s Q2 2008 Global Search Spend Analysis series – via MarketingCharts.

There are also signs of compression in paid-search spending growth, evidenced by a dip to 43 percent from a 52 percent growth rate in the previous quarterly analysis, according to Covario, which said this decline is partly because of budgetary pressures from economic conditions and better optimization that enables similar return results at lower spend levels.

Although the share of spending allocation in APAC is only about 7 percent of budget allocation, Yahoo’s portion increased nearly 35 percent at the expense of Google. Yahoo climbed from approximately 15 percent in Q1 to 50 percent in Q2, while Google decreased from 72 percent in Q1 to 46 percent in Q2. The remainder of this share gain came from Baidu. Q2 allocation to Baidu was only 5 percent in Q2, down from approximately 14 percent in Q1.