![19% Growth in Global Paid Search Sales Revenue in Shopping Season [New Study]](https://www.position2.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/blog-default-banner.jpg)
Global search saw a fruitful close in 2013.
Though 2013 is already behind us, there’s still useful data to be studied from it.
According to a recent study by Kenshoo, paid search based sales revenue during the end of year shopping season grew by 19% globally in 2013.
The 2013 shopping season saw a 34% year-over-year (YoY) increase in paid search spend. This increase in spends was met by an increase in clicks by 26.9% and CTR by 12.5% (YoY). Presumably, a result of this was that online shopping went up by 19% in 2013.
The increase in paid search spends by US marketers (YoY) during the shopping season was especially high at 48.1% and they saw a 14.1% increase in CTR.
The strong end of year spends seems to indicate what to expect in 2014 with 72% respondents in a PPC Hero study saying that they plan to increase paid search spend in 2014.
Mobile devices drove 36.7% of all the global paid search clicks in 2013. Tablets claimed the biggest share in this percentage with 16.3% of total clicks and 18.9% of the revenue (Kenshoo).
Mobile devices are increasingly being used for online search and shopping with 24% of online shopping on Nov 28th and 29th taking place from these devices. These spends and retailer promos indicate that the trend of focusing on mobile paid search and cross-channel linking is likely to continue.
The reign of mobile devices is projected to continue in 2014 too. Linking offline data with online activities has been of high importance from quite some time. The same cross-channel linking is important for online mobile clicks too. Integrating call tracking solutions and generating mobile-optimized ad creative and landing pages will also become significant in 2014.
PLAs saw a strong rise in usage in the end of 2013 YoY (Kenshoo) and it’s likely that this trend will continue in 2014.
CTR for PLAs increased by 30% in 2013 enabling search marketers to generate 115.6% more clicks from only 65.4% more impressions. PLAs also performed better than paid search ads leading to the belief that richer ad formats are the order of the day. This was reinforced with Google allowing usage of images in search ads.
Looks like paid search is set to grow at impressive rates along with other major digital marketing areas in 2014. What are your thoughts on paid search’s current position?
