2012 Closes Strong with Spend on Tablets Eclipsing Smartphones in the US

Today Marin released its Global Online Advertising Trends Quarterly Report for the fourth quarter of 2012. As with previous quarters, we built this report using the Marin Global Online Advertising Index— for this release, we refreshed our client index data pool to ensure more representative analysis and findings.

The fourth quarter has always proven to be the busiest for marketers—retailers in particular—because of the holiday season. On a quarter-over-quarter basis, advertisers faced increased competition resulting in higher costs per click versus Q3 2012.

As predicted earlier this year, we saw mobile traffic peak at nearly 22% of all paid search clicks on Google in the US; we saw similar mobile traffic levels in the UK and Australia. Most noteworthy in the US was the share of spend on tablets eclipsing that of smartphones at 9% and 8%, respectively.

As Marin’s customer base continues to expand globally, we have committed to expanding our analysis into new verticals and geographies to help provide more granular insights for marketers. In this quarterly report we included insights on paid search performance in Australia as well as industry-specific metrics for the Finance, Retail and Travel verticals in the UK.

At a geographic level, here are some other key findings from the US, UK, Eurozone and Australia:

• US advertisers saw paid search click volume rise by 31% accompanied by a 38% increase in impression volume
• In the UK, the Finance vertical has shown strong growth in both impressions and clicks over the last year with a 48% increase in impressions and a 27% increase in clicks
• The Eurozone saw paid-search click volume rise by 44% accompanied by a 62% increase in impression volume, indicating the continued growth of search advertising for marketers
• Australia showed the highest percent of mobile click and spend share at 26% and 20%, respectively

Read the full report with additional data and trends here.