Spending and Pricing Trends Across Paid Search, Social Advertising, and Retail Media
With the holiday season behind us, spending was down across all primary digital marketing channels in January, as expected. Retail media saw the biggest slide, down a quarter from December, while paid social had the largest share of accounts decreasing expenditures, with 58% of Skai accounts in the channel spending less in December than in January.
In each channel, ad prices dropped for a majority of accounts. In January, 65% of retail media accounts and 51% of search accounts had a lower cost per click, while 84% of social accounts paid less per thousand impressions.
How do you measure up? Check out these benchmarks to see if your programs are on par with your industry peers, ahead, or behind the curve.
This is a continuation of our monthly paid media snapshot series. As with any benchmark, your mileage may vary, but we hope this provides a bit more context for you as a marketer as you navigate the ups and downs of your program’s performance.
Monthly Industry Snapshot – January 2024
Methodology: Only Skai accounts with spend above a minimum threshold for the previous three months are included in these benchmarks. Please note that the selection criteria used here differ from the Skai Quarterly Trends Report and may not be consistent with those results in all cases. Starting in November 2023, paid social data has been expanded to include Meta, Pinterest, TikTok, LinkedIn, and YouTube.
How to read these charts
Accounts are divided into segments based on increases or decreases of at least 5% in monthly spending and CPC for retail media and paid search or CPM for paid social. Those segments are then plotted on a bubble chart where the x-axis represents the month-over-month (MoM) percent change in pricing for that segment, and the y-axis is the MoM percent change in total spending. Bubble size represents the percent of total Skai accounts.
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. In contrast, bubbles below the diagonal mean that volume grew slower.
Paid Search
Overall paid search spending decreased 16% in January, while average CPC dropped 3%. Average spending per day dipped 16%.
- 40% of search accounts spent more in January than in December compared to 41% who spent less, and the average price of a click increased for 26% of accounts and decreased for 51%, with the remaining share for each metric seeing no change.
- Of the segments that showed movement in both spending and pricing, the largest was where both spending and CPC decreased, which comprised 28% of all paid search accounts in the analysis. Another 37% showed no change in either spending levels OR the price per click.
Social Advertising
Overall, paid social spending dropped by 15% in January, while average CPM decreased by 9%. Average spending per day dipped 15%.
- 32% of social accounts spent more in January than in December compared to 58% who spent less, and the average price of one thousand impressions increased for 12% of accounts and decreased for 84%, with the remaining share for each metric seeing no change.
- Of the segments that showed movement in both spending and pricing, the largest was where both spending and CPM decreased, which comprised 49% of all paid social accounts in the analysis. Another 14% showed no change in either spending levels OR the price per thousand impressions.
Retail Media
Retail media spending decreased 25% in January, while average CPC dropped 7%. Average spending per day dipped 25%.
- 36% of retail media accounts spent more in January than in December, compared to 53% who spent less, and the average price of a click increased for 15% of accounts and decreased for 65%, with the remaining share for each metric seeing no change.
- Of the segments that showed movement in both spending and pricing, the largest was where both spending and CPC decreased, which comprised 41% of all retail media accounts in the analysis. Another 27% showed no change in either spending levels OR the price per click.
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 Quarterly Trends Reports hub.
Please visit The Breakthrough and the Skai Research Center for ongoing insights, analysis, and interviews on all things related to digital advertising.
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