The Los Angeles Times reported at the end of last week that eBay has decided to resume advertising with Google's AdWords system. The disagreement between the 2 companies, which has been widely reported over the past few weeks, was sparked off when eBay took umbrage at Google's apparent attempts to encourage eBay's customers to move their payment system from PayPal to Google's own Checkout system.

eBay is one of the largest advertisers on Google, buying millions of keyword adverts to promote its online auctions. Having pulled these ads for several weeks would have given eBay an excellent insight into the impact of this advertising on its traffic and usage, whilst saving significant amounts of money. There have been some unconfirmed figures on money saved and the changes to eBay's traffic, but interestingly, eBay is reported to have decided to increase their reliance on advertising through other services as well.

Whether this is the result of eBay's own conclusions into the effectiveness of such a huge campaign, or lingering bad feeling from the whole episode, remains to be seen. eBay will now be increasing their spend using other channels, including Yahoo!, MSN and Ask.