A new report from Merkle’s Q3 Digital Marketing Report has made apparent that the the future is in the mobile industry from the statistics the report has outlined. Looking at paid search, social media channels and organic search results, Merkle’s Q3 report came to the overall conclusions (with percentages referring to year on year growth):

• General ad spend for the US and CTR has increased by 20% and 28% respectively while the average CPC across PPC advertising has decreased by 6%.
• The ad spend, amount of clicks and CPC of mobile PPC has increased by a staggering 134%, 98% and 18% whereas table and laptop devices saw negative trends of 3-10% (except for the desktop CPC which increased by 8%).
• Every device except for the mobile has decreased organic searches for Q3 of 2016 where mobile searches have increased by 9%.

A very interesting report to say the least as it gives PPC advertisers a rough idea as to the direction PPC is heading based on how web users are interacting online towards the end of 2016.

#1 Mobiles are Becoming More Popular

Although the best internet experience is arguably on the laptop or a tablet, it cannot be ignored that mobiles are becoming the preferred choice for browsing the internet and searching for things: mainly down to their ease of use. This could potentially be down to operating systems such as Android, which now incorporates artificial intelligence into their operating system (or Google Now for older models), which is an easy way to Google search anything – the same can be applied with Apple’s Siri.

As well as this, the device that the majority of people have on them at all times is their smartphone. Therefore, it makes sense that mobile searches are increasing since it is the device most people have on them at their convenience to search the internet.

#1 CPC Decreasing a Problem?

For publishers of PPC advertising, a decreasing CPC is never a good sign as if it has decreased 6%, does that mean the revenue you produce from programs such as Adsense will decrease by 6% too? Not necessarily. Google over the last few years have pushed to make the RPM statistic a more important statistic than CPC since it is a more rounded statistic that best describes how the Adsense account is doing overall.

In general, any changes that are between 0-10% are going to make a slight difference. However, in terms of reasons why there is a change, it is not enough of a percentage change to bring forward potential reasons why, for example, the CPC has decreased. Maybe more websites have been using PPC this year than last year?

Regardless of this, it is important to note that the Ad spend for PPC in the US has increased dramatically (by 20%). Therefore, there are more advertisers out there with bigger budgets wanting to use PPC – this is a great sign for all publishers of the program.