Except for Amazon Sponsored Products, the growth of digital advertising on all platforms is slowing down. Its growth rate nearly doubled from 8% in the previous quarter to 15% in the third quarter.
When compared to the two-day event in July of the previous year, Amazon’s Sponsored Products increased by 29% during the Prime Day event. Google’s paid search advertising, which includes shopping and text advertisements, increased by 11%, compared to 14% in the second quarter. Spending on shopping campaigns, however, rose by 16% and was the same as the quarter before. Click-through rates (CTRs) for several ad categories seem to have been impacted by Google’s AI Overviews launch in May.
According to data published on Wednesday and accessed by the BrandSpur digital news platform, Tinuiti clients saw decreases. The largest decline was observed in the non-brand keyword group on mobile, where CTRs fell 14% between April and July. Lower click-through rates (CTRs) for text advertisements were first caused by AI Overviews’ tendency to show up more often for non-brand queries and take up more screen real estate on mobile devices.
In August and September, however, CTRs improved for all devices and keyword categories. The CTR for the non-brand mobile segment has risen by 6% since the beginning of 2023, albeit still being 4% lower than it was in April 2024.
Tinuiti’s Vice President of Research, Andy Taylor, stated: “At the same, we saw a drop in non-branded text ads clickthrough rates on phones, and standard Shopping campaigns improved.
“These campaign types play in the same auctions, and sometimes it’s the case that one campaign type can start to take precedence over another where one clickthrough rate could go up and the other down. In the past few months, we have seen an improvement,” he added.
The agency, which manages more than $4 billion in yearly digital ad spending, uses anonymized data on its advertising programs to create the Tinuiti Digital Ads Benchmark Report. Traditional sponsored search, paid social, and transactional media were all covered in the research. Notable changes in video and display advertising, especially on sites like YouTube and Netflix, were also noted.
According to the data, YouTube ad spending fluctuated, increasing by 11% in Q3 2024 after growing by 28% in the previous quarter. A spike in impressions in Q2 caused expenditure to rise while average CPMs decreased. According to the study, Q3’s slower rise is more consistent with YouTube’s official income data and shows better year-over-year comparisons.
According to Taylor: “It speaks to how it’s becoming even more viewed how folks will access through television sets. YouTube still lags behind other streaming platforms in terms of spending on television. We’ve seen TV-screen growth outpace that of other device types for YouTube for the last several quarters.”
TV screens accounted for 34% of YouTube ad spending in Q3 2024, up from 30% in the same period the year before, according to the agency, which also saw a notable growth in YouTube TV ad spending across other platforms. TV ad spending on YouTube increased by 24% year over year (YoY), more than twice as fast as other device spending.
Although the percentage of spending on phones decreased slightly from 50% in Q3 2023 to 49% in Q3 2024, YouTube ad spending on mobile devices rose by 10% YoY in Q3. The largest decrease was seen by tablets, whose proportion of ad expenditure dropped from 8% in Q3 2023 to 6% in Q3 2024.
