According to The Search Agency State of Paid Search Report, total search advertising spend across Google and Yahoo!-Bing increased 21.6% year-over-year, in addition to other findings using aggregated client data from various industries to identify paid search marketing trends across search engines and devices on a year-over-year (YoY - Q1 2012 to Q1 2013) and quarter-over-quarter (QoQ - Q4 2012 to Q1 2013) basis.
Keith Wilson, vice president of agency products at The Search Agency, says “... mobile and tablets helped drive this growth exponentially... tablets continue to be a driving force... consumers (using) tablets to shop and buy... performance steadily increasing over the past five quarters... “
Key findings from The Search Agency’s State of Paid Search Report include:
Despite seeing impressions down 4% YoY, a 15% increase in search click-through rate leads to an 11.7% increase in overall clicks. Coupled with an 8.8% YoY increase in CPC, total advertiser spend across Google and Yahoo!-Bing increased 21.6%.
After four consecutive quarters of a relatively consistent market share split between Google and Bing, Bing’s share of advertiser spend grew to 21%, up 3.6% YoY and 3% QoQ. Bing saw strong growth on tablets, increasing its share of spend from 10.6 to 15.3% YoY.
Consumers increased click volume on smartphones by 86% YoY. And despite a 10.4% drop in smartphone CPC, total advertiser spend on smartphones was up 68% YoY. Total spend on tablets went up 135% YoY.
The retail industry saw tremendous growth on mobile and tablets YoY. Smartphone click share for retail increased 78.2% YoY and 69.9% QoQ. Tablet click share increased 71.8% YoY and 13.5% QoQ. Click traffic from smartphones and tablets for the retail and e-commerce sector was larger than any other vertical in the study looking at consumer and business services, media and entertainment, real estate and construction, travel and leisure, with 39.6% of clicks.
Clicks on PLA (Product Listing Ads) increased enormously YoY and PLA clicks coming from smartphones and tablets increased 100% and 59.7% QoQ, respectively. Tablets came in at 9.9% of PLA clicks last quarter. For the first time, likely due to improvements to format and visibility on newer models, smartphones made up more than 2% of PLA clicks.
More information highlighted in the Executive Summary includes these facts:
All Search Engines Total Spend Trend (Indexed to Q1, 2012) | |
Quarter | Spending Index |
Q1 2012 | 1.00 |
Q2 2012 | 1.07 |
Q3 2012 | 0.97 |
Q4 2012 | 1.12 |
Q1 2013 | 1.22 |
Source: The Search Agency, April 2013 |
For more information from The Search Agency, pleas visit here; or view the PDF file here.