• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, January 12, 2015

U.S. marketers working with IgnitionOne spent 11% more on paid-search advertising in Q4 2014, compared with the year-ago quarter, and 35% more on programmatic display compared with the year-ago quarter.

Let's get display impressions out of the way. Display impressions rose 13%. Programmatic conversion data during the Thanksgiving weekend shows two peaks -- Black Friday representing nearly 20% of Thanksgiving weekend conversions, and Cyber Monday became the busiest day, with 25% of conversion volume.

From Thanksgiving Day to Cyber Monday, tablet usage more than doubled. "Considering that smartphone use is most often outside of the home and tablet is mostly used in-home, it is interesting to see the spike in phone activity on Black Friday as consumers are out of the house shopping as compared tablets use on Cyber Monday when they are more likely to shop at home online," per the IgnitionOne report.

For U.S. paid-search ads, the average cost per click among IgnitionOne clients rose as a result of advertisers opting out of the Google Search Partner Networks provided less expensive -- although not typically as effective -- options. Marketers continuing to pull out of the partner networks will push up CPC.

Mobile also contributed to a jump in Q4. As device use rises and more advertisers embrace mobile, mobile CPCs continue to grow at a higher rate than desktop, compared year-over-year (YoY). More focus on mobile and an increase in traffic means higher overall spend. Changes in September to Google's algorithms, which removed the ability to opt out of close variants for exact match have also driven up CPCs, per the IgnitionOne report.

Compared with the Q3, U.S. paid-search metrics rose nearly across the board due to holiday season activity. Impressions and spend rose 35% sequentially, and clicks rose 49%. Click–through rates rose 10% sequentially, while CPCs fell 9%, and eCPM came in flat.

Mobile phones saw the biggest increase in spend at 78% YoY, with impressions up 27% and clicks up 69%. Tablets saw the biggest increase in impressions at 50%, mostly driven by the Yahoo-Bing network, which IgnitionOne attributed to Enhanced Campaign changes. Tablet clicks rose 37%. Desktop impressions fell 13%, while clicks rose 16%, per the IgnitionOne report.

The Yahoo-Bing partner network continued to chip away at Google’s huge lead in 2014, with 26.3% of spend compared with Google's 73.7% in Q4, among IgnitionOne clients. This is the highest market share and largest growth in market share sequentially since before the inception of the Search Alliance.