Covario: Global Paid Search up 33% YoY

Mobile search saw significant increases, as well, as brands pushed more dollars into the mobile realm. Global search spending for mobiles increased 17% between Q2 and Q3 and by 90% YoY.

Search shows the strongest hold in North America and the Asia/Pacific regions, although search spending did soften in China. Some interesting takeaways include:

• Asia/Pacific search spending increased 45% YoY, 7% Quarter over Quarter
• North American search spending increased 39% YoY, 7% QoQ
• European search spending increased 10% YoY and 1% QoQ

"Across all of the search engines, the combination of a 4 percent increase in click-through rates and a 12 percent increase in CPCs suggest that keyword pricing in conjunction with higher performing ad formats - and not volume - has largely been responsible for the sequential growth," said Alex Funk, Global Performance Media Strategist, Covario.

On a global scale Google accounts for a 87% share of the search marketing spend; for Q3 2012 search spending increased 34% YoY for Google with an 8% increase between Q2 and Q3. And China's Baidu engine saw a 55% increase in search spending.

Meanwhile, comScore finds little change in the search market from a consumer perspective, with Google still accounting for more than 65% of explicit core searches (US). More than 16 billion explicit core searches were performed in September 2012. Nearly 70% of searches included organic search results from Google; about one-quarter (25.1%) were queried via Microsoft's Bing engine.

Tags: comScore, Covario, global paid search, paid search trends, search marketing