Mobile Search Spend Increases 71 Percent From Last Year [Study]

Paid search spending growth is up 22 percent for tablets and a whopping 71 percent for smartphones, according to the recent Q2 Digital Marketing Report from IgnitionOne, a company specializing in cloud-based marketing solutions.

While both mediums have comparable growth in CPC and CTR (24 and 28 percent for phones, 26 and 17 percent for tablets) smartphone clicks outpaced those from tablets by 41 percent. Similarly, smartphone impressions are up 8 percent year-over-year, while tablet impressions have declined by 17 percent.

“Google has incredible dominance on [the mobile] side,” says Will Margiloff, chief executive (CEO) of IgnitionOne. “But they still have, for the most part, a mobile display business and not really a native to phone and tablet business like Facebook. Google’s got their work cut out for them when it comes to mobile native or native display, and the only real player there is Facebook.”

 

While Google’s display growth is down 9 percent YoY, Facebook’s is up 48 percent, giving the social media giant 16 percent of the display share. Google’s share is 31 percent, down from 38 percent last year.

Facebook is posing a much greater threat to Google than Yahoo and Bing, which have a combined 24.5 percent of the search market share, to Google’s 75.5 percent. The Yahoo/Bing network has decreased two-and-a-half points from the previous quarter. To catch back up, Margiloff recommends a greater focus on mobile and more moves like the November deal, in which Yahoo became the default U.S. search engine on Mozilla’s Firefox browser.

“That was an interesting deal, the Mozilla deal,” Margiloff says. “They’re going to have to continue to do deals like that if they want to continue to get growth in share.”

According to IgnitionOne’s research, programmatic data spend increased 33 percent YoY, while eCPM grew 35 percent from 2014’s second quarter. While impressions are down 1 percent, it’s a relatively small number compared with the Facebook changes-fueled decreases from quarters past.

Regarding specific tactics, lookalike and contextual ads remained relatively consistent YoY, making up a total of 36 percent of programmatic display spend. Reach, on the other hand, doubled from 8 to 16 percent, at the expense of remarketing, which may be shrinking, but still remains the dominant tactic.

“Programmatic display growth continues to be what we expect,” Margiloff says. “Tech is becoming easier to implement or operate, whether directly from the market or inventory. Some of the social platforms like Pinterest, more and more, are moving to programmatic and becoming really simple to use.”