Digital Marketing

Core Search and Social trends are stable as marketers prepare for the fourth quarter

Newer entrants to the digital marketing space established themselves and made a strong case for their value to marketers, while adoption and growth of product-oriented ads across paid search, paid social, and ecommerce-specific publishers clearly established the essential pillars for digital marketers heading into the Q4 holiday season.
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW
MOBILE/PRODUCT SPOTLIGHT
CORE TRENDS
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW
Ecommerce Channel advertisers have tripled monthly spending on the Kenshoo platform from January through July of this year.
Instagram spending grew 94% year-over-year (YoY), faster than core Facebook (+37%) but still only comprised 9% of total spending across the two properties.
Mobile Shopping Campaign impressions more than doubled YoY, while click-through rate (CTR) stayed consistent.
Pinterest spending in Q3 actually exceeded its previous high in Q4 of last year, setting the stage for another strong seasonal increase.
Ecommerce
Ecommerce Channel advertisers have tripled monthly spending on the Kenshoo platform from January through July of this year.
Social
Instagram spending grew 94% year-over-year (YoY), faster than core Facebook (+37%) but still only comprised 9% of total spending across the two properties.
Search
Mobile Shopping Campaign impressions more than doubled YoY, while click-through rate (CTR) stayed consistent.
Pinterest
Pinterest spending in Q3 actually exceeded its previous high in Q4 of last year, setting the stage for another strong seasonal increase.
MOBILE/PRODUCT SPOTLIGHT

Mobile Spotlight

Ads on smartphones made up 81% of all social ad spending, and half of all search spending.

Product Spotlight

Based on last year, retail marketers can expect quarterly spending increases of over 70% as we enter the holiday season in Q4.
CORE TRENDS

Social Trends

  • Social ad spending grew 12% compared to Q2, while year-over-year growth was +40%, identical to last quarter
  • Instagram and Video ads (which are overlapping categories) were the biggest drivers of year-over-year growth for the quarter
  • Dynamic Ads for Products showed steady growth over the past three quarters in advance of an expected bigger jump in Q4
Impressions
QoQ
+7%
YoY
+24%
Clicks
QoQ
+5%
YoY
+51%
Spending
QoQ
+12%
YoY
+40%
CTR
QoQ
-3%
YoY
+22%
CPM
QoQ
+6%
YoY
+14%

Search Trends

  • Search spending growth continues to be steady at +10% YoY
  • Year-over-year search impression volume would actually be down without the contribution of mobile search shopping ads. Instead, it’s up 36%
  • This increase in mobile search shopping ads lowered overall CPC, but did not affect overall CTR at all
Impressions
QoQ
+12%
YoY
+38%
Clicks
QoQ
+6%
YoY
+28%
Spending
QoQ
+1%
YoY
+10%
CTR
QoQ
-7%
YoY
-7%
CPC
QoQ
-5%
YoY
-15%

View reports from previous quarters:

Methodology

Except where noted, analysis is based on Kenshoo advertisers with 15 consecutive months of performance data taken from a population of over 3,000 advertiser and agency accounts across 20 vertical industries and over 60 countries, spanning Google, Bing, Baidu, Yandex, Yahoo!, Yahoo! Japan, Pinterest, Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram and the Facebook Audience Network. Some outliers have been excluded. The resulting sample includes more than 500 billion impressions, 14 billion clicks and $6 billion (USD) in advertiser spending.

For charts showing impressions, clicks and spending, volume metrics have been normalized to a factor of 1 based on the initial volume for the first quarter of data. Data points from subsequent quarters are based on a multiplier from the first quarter. For example, 1.6 means that volume is 60% greater than volume on the initial quarter measured.

Ad spending and CPC are measured using Ex-FX or “Constant Currency” adjustments, where results are based on native currency, and only translated to common currency after aggregation.

Note: There may be variation in numbers for past or future research published by Kenshoo as the rolling data set is dynamic for each new quarter.