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IgnitionOne: Search Budgets, Clicks, Impressions Up

Search marketers lean on programmatic display buying more often these days. Perhaps it reminds them of search engine marketing. It turns out that U.S. marketing budgets rose 130% in Q2 for programmatic display buying. There's a new attribution model I'll highlight tomorrow that could give some insight into why.

IgnitionOne analysts believe programmatic display buying works hand-in-hand with paid search, as the latter can feed remarketing pools and generally results in some of the higher returning targets for remarketing

For now, U.S. retail marketers saw impressions rise 76% for programmatic display campaigns in Q2 2013, while travel marketers spent 156% more, according to the IgnitionOne Digital Marketing Report: Q2 2013. Clicks for the travel industry rose 79% and impressions 80%. The average price in retail for the quarter came in at $2.07; and for travel, $2.41.

U.S. marketers also spent 7% more on search campaigns in Q2, compared with the year-ago quarter, according to a report released Wednesday. Retailers specifically saw impressions rise 24% and, with it, search spend rose by 18% YoY.

The team said sees spend increase in conjunction with the increase in queries. Returns were not significantly changed from the past but marketers want to continue to reach those users at the same rate of return.

The IgnitionOne report also reveals that impressions and clicks rose 5%, compared with 7% and 11% sequential declines. In the quarter, the Yahoo Bing network with 20.8% relinquished prior-quarter gains to Google, which now holds 79.2% of share.

Mobile also made gains. U.S. marketers tripled the amount spent on paid-search ads for smartphones and tablets -- 106% and 116%, respectively. Impressions for tablets in the quarter rose 104%; and smartphones, 82. Clicks rose to 91% for tablets and 135% for smartphones. Cost-per-click (CPC) for smartphones fell by 13%, while tablets rose 13%.

The increase in advertisers migrating to Google Enhanced Campaigns continues to force higher CPCs for previously held ranks in search engine queries. Marketers have had to main higher budgets. IgnitionOne attributes the increase in cost to the difficulties in achieving and maintaining the top rank position on smartphones for some terms. The report mentions that the loss of "granular control adds to the complexity by preventing marketers from cherry picking a few terms to support their mobile or tablet budgets, forcing them to spread out budgets across campaigns."

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