Paid search spending increased by just over 10 percent year over year in Q4 2017 across Marin Software’s customer base. CPC growth doubled that of overall spend with an increase of roughly 20 percent year over year.

Mobile CPCs increased 25 percent year over year, accounting for 53 percent of total spend. Google took 89 percent of search spend share, with 11 percent going to Bing. The findings are part of Marin’s Q4 2017 Digital Benchmarks Report highlighting some of the key metrics realized across the accounts running campaigns through the platform.

Click volume was off roughly 7.5 percent from Q4 2016, while click-through rates increased from roughly 1.75 percent to more than 2.5 percent.

Source: Marin Software

Given the holiday season, it’s not surprising to see investment and activity in Shopping ads increase. Marin saw Google Shopping ad click share increase by 31 percent from Q3 to Q4 2017.

Looking more closely at CPCs by industry, education continues to stand out, with average CPCs of $3.80. However, that’s actually a decline of 2 percent from Q3.

Source: Marin Software

Two other points of interest from the report:

• Just 24 percent of the accounts included in the Q4 review were using audiences in their search campaigns.
• The number of ad groups that had three or more active ads actually fell by 3 percent from Q3 to Q4 2017 despite Google’s push to get advertisers to embrace the idea of running several ad creatives to improve ad group-level metrics.

The full report is available for download (registration required).

About The Author

As Third Door Media’s paid media reporter, Ginny Marvin writes about paid online marketing topics including paid search, paid social, display and retargeting for Search Engine Land and Marketing Land. With more than 15 years of marketing experience, Ginny has held both in-house and agency management positions. She provides search marketing and demand generation advice for ecommerce companies and can be found on Twitter as @ginnymarvin.

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