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Key Findings

Paid Search

%

YOY growth

A healthy economy and advertiser confidence drove global search spend.

Shopping Ads

%

of search budgets

Shopping share of budgets is at an all-time high as retailers ramp up for the holidays.

Instagram Ads

%

of FB spend

%

are Stories

Instagram is quickly grabbing an increasing share of global social spend.

Search Trends

After a small dip in YoY growth in Q2, global spend on search returned in Q3, averaging 12.9% globally. The US showed the strongest gains, followed by the UK, with the eurozone growing by only 5.7%. Perhaps the bite of GDPR and privacy concerns are finally starting to take their toll on the European search advertising market.

Click Volume

Spend

CPC

CTR

Search CPCs

Average global CPCs showed a modest increase from $0.80 in Q3 2017 to $0.83 in Q3 2018. CPCs remain substantially lower in the eurozone at $0.44 in Q3 2018, compared to $0.96 in the US and $0.98 in the UK. These rates aren’t surprising since the eurozone has less mature markets with potentially less competition.

Shopping

Shopping ads captured 37% of search spending for retailers—an all-time high—eclipsing the 36% observed last quarter. The UK and EMEA continue to see a higher share of budgets dedicated to Shopping campaigns.

Social Trends

CPM and CPC were both down in Q3, perhaps reflecting some of the pressure on Facebook from GDPR and recent privacy-related incidents. Customer behavior appears to be less affected, with CTRs flat from Q2 at 1.67% globally.

Methodology

Each quarter, we aggregate advertising performance across our customer base, and share our results with digital marketing professionals to compare against their own initiatives. In addition to global industry trends, we explore the most compelling areas of digital marketing, including the evolution of mobile, the best use of creative for more clicks and market share, and using the right search and social tools to attract the right customers.

Benchmarks are calculated using a “same store sales” approach with only the advertisers who were clients during Q3 2017 to Q3 2018. Performance of a specific segment may be materially influenced by performance of one or two larger advertisers.

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