US advertisers are continuing to up their paid search budgets after recording double-digit growth for ad clicks and impressions year on year.
The IgnitionOne Q2 2014 marketing report shows a 12% rise in impressions from paid search ads when comparing the second quarter of 2013 to the same period this year. Ad clicks also rose, by 25% overall, and click-through rates (CTR) grew 12% between the two quarters.
IgnitionOne has attributed the widespread improvements to innovations in paid search technology, particularly for ad extensions and image ads.
Google retains crown
As paid search budgets continued to rise, so too did business for the biggest engine on the web – Google. The company managed to gain an even bigger share of the market in Q2 2014 as it stole off arch-rival Bing to reel in 79% of all paid search spend.
Bing saw its share of the spoils drop down to 21% as a result.
Facebook’s remarketing platform – Facebook Exchange – also welcomed growth between the two quarters. The service jumped from accounting for 8% of all display ad spend in 2013 up to 18% in 2014.
Mobile matters
In addition, the results show that paid search spend on mobiles is continuing to grow at a rapid pace. US search marketers invested 47% more on tablet ads than in 2013, while smartphone spend grew by a staggering 173%.
However, after tablet budgets were much higher than those for smartphones in 2013, the huge gap in growth meant that advertisers spent very similar amounts on both devices during Q2 2014.
The combined readings allowed handheld devices to account for 27% of all US search spend.