• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, October 23, 2024

Digital advertising growth continues to slow across many platforms with the exception of Amazon Sponsored Products. In Q3, growth nearly doubled to 15% compared with 8% in the prior quarter.

Strong growth during Amazon’s key Prime Day event in Sponsored Products jumped 29% compared with the two-day event last year in July.

Google paid-search advertising across text ads and shopping grew 11% -- down from 14% in the second quarter -- but shopping campaign spend rose 16%, remaining flat compared with the prior quarter.

The widespread launch of Google AI Overviews in May seemed to affect click-through rates (CTRs) across multiple ad segments.

Data released Wednesday suggests that Tinuiti clients experienced declines.

From April to its lowest point in July, the non-brand keyword segment on phones saw the largest decline with CTRs falling 14%.

AI Overviews were more likely to serve for non-brand queries and take up a larger share of the screen on phones -- consistent with the technology having a negative impact on text ad CTRs, at least initially.

During August and September, CTR recovered across device and keyword segments. While the rates remain 4% lower for the non-brand phone segment compared with April 2024, they are up 6% since the beginning of 2023.

“At the same we saw a drop in non-branded text ads clickthrough rates on phones, standard Shopping campaigns improved,” said Andy Taylor, vice president of research at Tinuiti. “These campaign types play in the same auctions, and sometimes it’s the case that one campaign type can start to take precedence over another where one clickthrough rate could go up and the other down. In the past few months, we have seen an improvement.”

The Tinuiti Digital Ads Benchmark Report is based on anonymized performance data from advertising programs supported by the agency with annual digital ad spend of more than $4 billion.

The analysis also followed traditional paid search, paid social, and commerce media, but one of the more interesting trends this past quarter occurred in video and display — YouTube, Netflix and others.

The data points to interesting spikes and declines in YouTube ad spend, which grew 11% in Q3 2024, down from 28% growth a quarter earlier.

In Q2, Tinuiti advertisers saw a spike in impression volume that drove up spending while depressing average CPMs. The deceleration in spending growth in Q3 is more in line with official YouTube revenue metrics and more reflective of strengthening year-ago spending growth comparisons, according to the report.

“It speaks to how it’s becoming even more viewed how folks will access through television sets,” Taylor said. “YouTube still lags other streaming platforms in terms of share of spend going to televisions. We’ve seen TV-screen growth outpace that of other device types for YouTube for the last several quarters.”

The agency saw advertisers more than double YouTube TV ad spend for other devices. TV screens accounted for 34% of YouTube spending in Q3 2024 -- up from 30% a year earlier.

Spending on YouTube ads on TVs rose 24% year-over-year (YoY) -- more than double the rate of growth of other devices.

YouTube ad spending on phones rose 10% YoY in Q3, but phone share of spend slipped from 50% in Q3 2023 to 49% in Q3 2024.

Tablets saw the greatest decline from year to year with tablets accounting for 8% of spend in Q3 2023 and 6% in Q3 2024.