Kenshoo reveals impact of mobile on social and paid search ads

Year-on-year ad spend grew 66% in search and a whopping 159% in social, accounting for the dominant driver of global ad growth, according to Kenshoo. The figures were derived from data tracked from more than 3,000 advertisers and agency accounts across 20 vertical industries in over 70 countries.

In Q3 2015 alone, two-thirds of paid social ad clicks were on smartphones or tablets, as were half of paid search ad clicks.

"As consumers spend more of their time on mobile devices, marketers are developing increasingly better optimized campaigns to make the most of the opportunity," said Rob Coyne, Kenshoo's Managing Director for EMEA.

The increased activity on mobile saw a rise in the number of ad impressions on phones and a greater than 100% increase in mobile clicks compared with 2014. As a consequence, mobile spend and clicks has helped to drive overall search cost-per-click down by 7%.

Kenshoo also notes that with Facebook's recent revision of cost-per-click definition to focus more on link clicks as opposed to engagement clicks such as shares, comments and Likes, marketers can expect to see improvements in social campaign effectiveness.

Image via Shutterstock

Tags: advertising, mobile, paid search, social marketing