Breaking down monthly trends across digital channels by industry category
This analysis builds on the Monthly Paid Media Snapshot to look at changes in spending and ad prices by industry category. As with any benchmark, your results may vary, but we hope this provides more context for you as a marketer as you navigate the ups and downs of your program’s performance.
Methodology: For these benchmarks, only Skai accounts with spend above a minimum threshold for the previous three months are included. Categories are assigned through a combination of algorithmic and manual methods, both at the account level and the Skai profile level, where applicable. Please note that the selection criteria used here differ from the Skai Quarterly Trends Report and subsequently may not be consistent with those results in all cases.
How to read these charts
There are two charts for each channel. The first bubble chart shows month-over-month (MoM) changes in ad pricing–average cost per click (CPC) for paid search and retail media and average cost per thousand impressions (CPM) for paid social on the x-axis and MoM changes in ad spending on the y-axis. For example, a bubble in the upper right quadrant of the chart means both price and spending increased. The size of the bubble does not reflect anything except the overall channel having the larger bubble in each instance.
The diagonal line indicates spending changes that are completely described by the change in pricing. Bubbles above the diagonal mean that ad volume—clicks for retail media and paid search, impressions for paid social—grew faster than pricing, while bubbles below the diagonal mean that volume grew slower.
The second chart in each series shows actual CPC/CPM by category for the current month and the previous month. Bubble size, again, simply differentiates the overall channel value from the individual categories.
Retail Media
Overall, retail media spending grew 24% in July, while average CPC increased 12%.
Prime Day made the biggest impact on Home & Garden, Computers & Electronics and Beauty & Personal Care, which all saw larger increases than the overall channel. Every named category saw higher prices and increased spend, and with all categories above the diagonal reference line, click volume increased across the board as well.
In terms of actual pricing, our new data visualization shows us the Health and Family & Community were the categories with the highest CPC in July and Apparel had the lowest, which was the same as last month. We can also see the increase in CPC for Beauty & Personal Care bringing it close to the highest-priced categories, while Home & Garden jumped up to a higher price than the overall retail media channel.
Paid Search
Overall paid search spending decreased 8% in July, while average CPC dropped 1%.
Much of the search decline came from two categories. Travel & Tourism finally gave back some of the spending increases it has seen over the last several months, while Internet & Telecom dropped 27%. Both segments saw CPC drop significantly as well, in addition to the decline in click volume indicated by both bubbles being below our diagonal reference line. On the other side, Jobs & Education saw the largest increase in spending and Finance had the biggest jump in CPC.
Jobs & Education continues to post the highest CPC of all categories, and got even higher in July, putting more distance between it and the second-highest category of Internet & Telecom. As seen in the previous chart, Finance also showed some movement on pricing, pulling away from the “pack” of categories that was bunched up around $1.00 per click last month.
Social Advertising
Overall, paid social spending stayed level in July, while average CPM decreased by 6%.
Jobs & Education saw a big jump in spending on a nearly 50% increase in CPM while impression levels decreased. Finance and Apparel, on the other hand, saw CPM go down, growing spend on a much larger quantity of impressions. Both Food & Groceries and News, Media & Publications decreased spending on both lower ad prices and lower impression volume.
The high CPM of News, Media & Publications makes differentiating between the other categories somewhat difficult, but we can see the movement to the right for Jobs & Education–the lone category to increase in price in July–and the movement to the left for Apparel, which had the largest decline in CPM.
Check out more resources from Skai
Come back next month for the most up-to-date data. Until then, you can dive into more of our research via our Skai Research Center or Quarterly Trends Reports hub.
And please visit the Skai blog and Whitepaper Library for ongoing insights, analysis, and interviews on all things related to digital advertising.
