HOW MOBILE IS CHANGING THE SEARCH LANDSCAPE
It’s no secret that mobile is the future of search. Back in March, comScore released its Digital Future in Focus study looking at the key stats for the U.S. market in terms of searches done on desktops, smartphones, and tablets. Between the fourth quarter of 2013 and the fourth quarter of 2014, desktop searches decreased from 45.7% to 45.5% while smartphone searches increased from 10.8% to 12.6% and tablet searches grew from 4.6% to 5.9%.
In total, comScore found that overall mobile search queries made up roughly 29% of total search volume with smartphones searches occurring twice as much as those done on tablets, which makes sense based on the fact that there are far more smartphones in the market than tablets. What’s more interesting is that in terms of overall digital media time, people are spending the majority of their time—60%—on mobile devices compared to 40% for desktops. However, until recently, ad spend and revenues were not in line with this changing landscape.
According to IgnitionOne, a company that specializes in cloud-based marketing solutions, the past year has seen a massive surge in mobile device ad spend, with paid search spending growth up 22% on tablets and up a massive 71% for smartphones. Although both platforms had comparable growth in CPC and CTR, (24% and 28% for phones, 26% and 17% for tablets) smartphone clicks outpaced tablets by 41%. Additionally, smarphone impressions are up 8% while tablet impressions are down 17%.
“Google has incredible dominance on [the mobile] side,” says Will Margiloff, chief executive (CEO) of IgnitionOne. “But they still have, for the most part, a mobile display business and not really a native to phone and tablet business like Facebook. Google’s got their work cut out for them when it comes to mobile native or native display, and the only real player there is Facebook.”
So while Google’s ad display growth is down 9% year-over-year, Facebook’s growth has risen 48%, giving it 16% of the overall internet display share. Google’s display share is currently 31%, down from 38% in 2014.
So what does this mean for mobile advertisers in general? While Google is still the big player in PPC advertising, Facebook is growing into a much bigger threat to Google, especially more than the other major search engines Bing and Yahoo, who control 24.5% of the search market compared to Google’s 75.5%. Yahoo’s share is likely to grow though with the recent announcement by Mozilla that Yahoo will now be the default search engine for Firefox.
Looking forward to the rest of 2015, digital advertisers will want to start diversifying their spend more, concentrating the bulk of it on the searches in Google where they are having the most conversions, and moving their leftover spend to Facebook and Bing and Yahoo to maximize their reach.
