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Key Findings

Paid Search

%

YoY growth

A 25% increase in Finance advertising makes this industry competitive with other verticals.

eCommerce Ads

x

increase

Monthly spending on eCommerce ads increased 5x since January 2018.

Paid Social

%

of FB spend

Dynamic Product Ads captured 35% of total Facebook spend.

Search Trends

With paid search spend growing by 10% globally YoY, Q4 remains the strongest quarter, with Financial Services (+25%) and Retail (+12%) leading the end-of-year charge. As inventory gets more expensive, however, more spend doesn’t necessarily mean more clicks.

Click Volume

Spend

CPC

CTR

Search CPCs

Travel clocked the lowest global CPC in Q4 at $0.45, followed by retail at $0.48. Consumer confidence, strong economies, and greater competition are all contributing to higher CPCs in other sectors.

Shopping

Consistent with Q3 2018, Google Shopping Ads captured 36% of search spending for all verticals. Shopping Ads remain retail advertisers’ bread and butter, as eCommerce search engines increasingly join the quest to deliver relevant, targeted experiences.

Social Trends

With over 400 million daily users now on Instagram Stories, advertisers are flocking to this ad format. Stories offer businesses a unique opportunity to capture the direct attention of audiences and potential customers, and provide a lower-cost alternative to Instagram Feed ads. Also: Significant spend has shifted YoY from Page Likes ads to lower-funnel formats like Dynamic Product Ads and Collection Ads, which maximize the mobile experience with alluring, high-quality, product-focused ads.

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 Q4 2017 to Q4 2018. Performance of a specific segment may be materially influenced by performance of one or two larger advertisers.

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