The Q2 digital marketing report shows some interesting findings on how paid search is eating away the share of organic search even though the paid search spend dropped steeply from the last 4 quarters. Other insights include, data on the performance of expanded text ads beta stage, dropping CPCs, increased clicks on Google’s PLA’s, Facebook ad trends and more.
You can download the report here to view the entire analysis and make use of its findings.
For now, we share some of the key highlights of the Q2 report:
1. Deceleration in Google search ad spend
Though the search spend increased by 15% YoY in Q2, 2016; it dropped down from 19% growth observed in Q1, 2016. CPCs continue to fall whereas clicks fell slightly from Q1, 2016. Analysis of search spend by verticals show that financial services witnessed a 45% increase YoY whereas the spend was the weakest in the insurance vertical.
On the ad formats front, spend on text ads decelerated 10 10% in Q2, 2016 while the PLA fromat continued to see a substantial growth. Further spending on Bing and Yahoo Gemini also fell by 17% YoY.
2. Beta test shows promising results for Expanded Text Ads
On comparing Traditional text ads with Expanded text ads for brand and non brand ads showed that the ETA performance was 16% higher for non brand ad groups for desktop. However for brand text ads the performance was more or less similar to that of traditional text ads.It was also observed that the ad groups received 47% of the impressions from ETAs. With Google recently rolling out the ad format, advertisers can see this promising feedback as a stepping stone for their AdWords account.
3. Organic search share losing out to paid search
With mobile organic search traffic dropping, mobile visits by paid search has increased leading to the cannibalization of organic search by paid search. This can be as a result of increased mobile paid ad results from previous two ads to three ads. Further the organic search visit share has fallen to 29% in Q2, 2016.
4. Large chunk of display ad spend used to retarget customer
About 62% of display ad spend was used by advertisers to reach out to customers already visited the site. This shows how the advertisers are laying more emphasis on customer retention than customer acquisition.
Also, overall display ad spend increased by 32% YoY in Q2, 2016 whereas the total share of google spend on GDN was observed to have increased by 12% from 11% the previous year.
Here were some of the key findings pulled out from the report. Download the entire report for more indepth details.
Related Articles:
Stop the wasted ad spend. Get more conversions from the same ad budget.
Our customers save over $16 Million per year on Google and Amazon Ads.