{"id":357,"date":"2016-04-20T01:55:36","date_gmt":"2016-04-20T01:55:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/feeds.searchengineland.com\/~r\/searchengineland\/~3\/0iaEWhESoxA\/google-drove-95-percent-us-smartphone-paid-search-clicks-q1-merkle-247731"},"modified":"2016-12-27T16:20:08","modified_gmt":"2016-12-27T16:20:08","slug":"google-drove-95-percent-of-us-smartphone-paid-search-clicks-in-q1-merkle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fixmyinfo.com\/google-drove-95-percent-of-us-smartphone-paid-search-clicks-in-q1-merkle\/","title":{"rendered":"Google drove 95 percent of US smartphone paid search clicks in Q1 [Merkle]"},"content":{"rendered":"
Source: Google drove 95 percent of US smartphone paid search clicks in Q1 [Merkle]<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n  <\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n If there’s one theme to be taken from Merkle&x2019;s Q1 Digital Marketing Report, it&x2019;s that Google is miles ahead of Bing and Yahoo in driving and monetizing mobile search traffic.<\/p>\n Driven almost entirely&xA0;by Google, mobile paid search continues to grow, with smartphone click share rising from 33 percent in Q4 2015 to 39 percent in Q1 2016 overall. On&xA0;Google, 57 percent of paid search clicks came from mobile in Q1.&xA0;Overall, desktop paid search clicks were&xA0;flat and tablet clicks were off 5 percent year-over-year, compared to 101 percent growth for smartphone clicks.<\/p>\n Google paid search saw solid&xA0;growth in Q1 among Merkle&x2019;s client base, with spend rising 25 percent year-over-year as click volume increased 33 percent. Overall CPCs fell 6 percent as mobile click share continued to rise. Non-brand search ad clicks grew 42 percent and spend on non-brand keywords rose 24 percent,&xA0;the highest growth rate seen in six quarters.<\/p>\n Combined spend across Bing Ads and Yahoo Gemini fell 10 percent year-over-year. Clicks were off 14 percent, though CPCs rose 4 percent.<\/p>\n Among Merkle&x2019;s client base, 95 percent of all paid search clicks that came from phones were generated by Google in Q1, up from 86 percent a year ago. Bing Ads held 19 percent of desktop clicks, 13 percent of tablet clicks and just 3 percent of all US smartphone clicks. Yahoo Gemini generated 3 percent of all desktop and tablet ad clicks and just one percent of all smartphone ad clicks.<\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n Merkle&x2019;s customer base is skews&xA0;large US retailer, which makes these quarterly reports somewhat of a bellwether of PLA trends in the US. In Q1,&xA0;PLA spend rose&xA0;41 percent year-over-year compared to 13 percent growth from text ads.<\/p>\n PLAs accounted for 43 percent of Merkle&x2019;s retail clients&x2019; overall search ad clicks from Google and a whopping 70 percent of non-brand clicks. PLAs are generating a greater share of clicks for larger retailers than smaller, but the median retailer generated 37 percent of overall Google clicks from PLAs.<\/p>\n Clicks from search partners (which include third-party retail sites and, somewhat oddly, Google image search) rose 545&xA0;percent year-over-year and contributed 6 percent of the total PLA click growth.<\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n In contrast to Google&x2019;s ongoing ability to monetize PLAs from mobile and search partners, Bing saw spending growth from Product Ads slow to just 21 percent in Q1, down from 98 percent a year ago.<\/p>\n Non-brand clicks across both engines fell 12 percent in Q1 as spend on non-brand keywords fell 10 percent. Non-brand CPCs rose 2 percent.<\/p>\n Yahoo Gemini&x2019;s share of combined clicks across Bing and Yahoo has held relatively steady since August 2015 when it pushed migration from Bing Ads. In Q1, Gemini&x2019;s click share was just under 17 percent.<\/p>\n On&xA0;smartphones, overall clicks from both engines were down 9 percent compared to the previous year. Notably, Merkle points out, “Though originally launched as a mobile platform, 56% of Gemini clicks were on desktop in Q1”.<\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n Merkle says there has been&xA0;relatively little impact on both paid and organic trends from Google&x2019;s most substantial paid search change of Q1, &xA0;namely removing text ads from the right rail on desktop. However, PLAs&xA0;appear to have received a slight boost to in&xA0;click volume as Google seems to be showing PLAs in the mainline with greater frequency, and there is less visual competition when they appear in the right rail.<\/p>\n The full report is available for download here<\/a>.<\/p>\nGoogle increasingly dominates mobile paid search<\/h2>\n
PLA details<\/h2>\n
More on Bing Ads and Gemini<\/h2>\n
Effect of Google removing right rail text ads<\/h2>\n
\n