Adobe has released its latest ad data report for search ads.
According to a post at TechCrunch, U.S. search ad spend grew about 9 percent year-over-year, mostly through click growth. For the full year, including the proverbially strong fourth quarter, Adobe “expects that spend will increase between 10 and 12 percent.”
It comes as no shock that the leader in search ad spend is Google. The company now commands 78 percent of the market among Adobe’s customers. That’s down slightly from 80 percent in the first quarter and 82 percent in the last quarter of 2013, but is in line with the 78 percent Adobe reported a year ago.
In a word, no player — and there are some — has dislodged Google in this marketplace.
The other 22 percent went to Yahoo/Bing, which managed to increase its U.K. market share to 8.8 percent, but is a negligible player in Germany, where Google manages 96 percent of the search ad market.
According to TechCrunch, the analysis was based on looking at over 200 billion search impressions worth roughly $2 billion from over 500 Marketing Cloud users that use Adobe’s programmatic advertising platform.
Cost-per-click (CPC), one of the main indicators of Google’s success, is up slightly by 4 percent year-over-year. On Bing, however, CPC is down 6 percent.
The most interesting data point in the report is that search ad spend targeting tablets is stalling. It currently accounts for about 14 percent all search spend, but that’s only up from 12 percent 10 months ago. Mobile ad spend passed tablet spend, growing from 10 percent to 15 percent.
“The other interesting factoid is that click-through rates on Google rose by 20 percent,” says TechCrunch. “Adobe attributes this shift at least partly to Google’s new ad formats, which now look like an organic part of the search results page (and is hence more likely to trick people into clicking ads). Adobe found that these rates are up across different industries.”
