Search spend to grow 15%-20% in 2012 but CPC down
Friday, January 13th, 2012
Rise of mobile has big affect on CPCs.
I just reviewed Efficient Frontier’s Q4 report for online advertising, which includes predictions for 2012.
The good news? The company predicts search spend will increase 15%-20% in 2012. On the downside for domain parkers, CPC will decrease 4% on top of 5% Quarter-over-quarter that they reported in Q4.
To be fair, this isn’t an across the board drop in CPC. A lot of it is attributed to an increase in mobile ad clicks, which currently cost less.
Here’s some other interesting data.
Mobile ads are exploding. It’s 7%-8% of search spend right now, up from 2% a year ago. Efficient Frontier expects it to be a whopping 16-22% of all paid clicks by the end of 2012!
This includes tablets, which I think should be a separate category from mobile phone traffic.
Yahoo/Bing ROI tops Google. The combo continues to have a better return-on-click for advertisers, but needs to grow its base to attract advertisers.
Facebook is huge in online advertising. The company predicts it will account for 5% of all online ad spend by the end of the year. In Q4 it reached 2.7% of biddable online advertising spend.
Further Reading:
Translation: More money for Google/Skynet.
I agree with you that tablets should be placed in different category as their screen are similar to laptops and it’s hard to compare them with mobile phones.
And one more thing: I have found that If i establish Adsense website and most traffic comes from Bing then it converts in Adsense way better than Google traffic. The difference is like 2-3 times higher.