Search advertising has seen consistent growth over the last year in all the key metrics among advertisers. Here’s everything you need to know.
It’s been a good year for paid search and anyone working in the industry. Benchmarking can help us understand where we are and what we should consider as success in our work. Kenshoo has released its Q1 2019 Quarterly Trends Report[1] to look at the latest trends in social and search advertising. The results are very encouraging for search and we’re looking at the key stats here.
An increase in spending and impressions
It’s interesting to see that there has been a drop from the last quarter both in the spending and the impressions in paid search. More specifically, there was a 16% decrease in spending and an 18% decrease in impressions[2]. It’s not surprising though as Q4 is usually the busiest quarter of the year with the biggest spending at the end of year campaigns.
When it comes to the comparison from Q1 2018 to Q1 2019 from Kenshoo, there has been an 11% YoY increase in paid search spending and a 36% increase in the impressions.
This means that search marketers increased their budget from 2018 to 2019 while also seeing the appropriate success in the increase of impressions.
What does a drop in CTR and CPC mean?
According to Kenshoo’s report, there has been a 25% YoY decrease in click-through rate (CTR) and also an 11% YoY decrease in CPC.
The significant drop in CTR could possibly reflect the growing competition and increased spending and impressions. It would even possibly affect an advertiser’s quality score in ads. It should not