Covario, the largest provider of search marketing services and management solutions, has recently released a report on Global Paid Search Spend Analysis. The report gave insight into paid search in the first quarter of 2012.
The analysis found that the paid search advertising spending increased by more than 22% from last year for technology and consumer electronics companies. Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising spending rose in the Americas and Asia Pacific regions and Cost-Per-Click (CPC) was down worldwide.
Pay-per-click ad spending has increased by 15% in the Americas and by nearly 88% in the Asia Pacific region. But there is a 2% decline in Europe. The Cost-per-click rates have dropped by 3% from the fourth quarter of 2011. The study author, Charles Gaylord who is a research analyst at Covario, opined that the decline in the keyword prices may be due to the changes in the search engine algorithm. He believed that it will stabilize in the second quarter of 2012. He also predicted that there will be an 18 to 20% increase in the CPC rates in the Americas, 15 to 18% increase in Europe and about 40% increase in the Asia Pacific regions.
The study also showed that Google continued to be in the top spot with 76% of the global paid search market share, while the Yahoo-Bing held a combined 13 % of market share worldwide. Baidu, which has over 80% of the search market share in China has grown by 4% since the last quarter and by 142% since the first quarter of 2011.
Another report released by Adobe’s Efficient Frontier said that Google CPCs has decreased by 5% year-on-year and Yahoo-Bing CPCs has increased by 18% year-on-year. The company noted that CPCs dropped by 17% in the retail sector and the rates were also down in the automotive and finance sector.
Efficient Frontier also studied the paid search trend on smartphones and tablets. The company said that the spending on mobile devices in the US represented 7.7% of all search spending in the first quarter. Tablet spending has grown from nearly zero in May 2011 to 4.25% in the overall search spending till March 2012.
The company also predicted that the overall mobile device spend will account for nearly 15 to 20% of search spend by the end of this year.
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