Spending and Pricing Trends Across Paid Search, Social Advertising, and Retail Media
June spending for search and retail media held mostly steady from May, with higher cost-per-click compensating for one less day in the month. Retail media gained 1%, while search dropped 1% overall.
Paid social CPM and average daily spending were both down 1%, which yielded a 4% decrease in channel spending for the whole month in total.
How do you measure up? Check out these benchmarks to see if your programs are on par with your industry peers or if you’re 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 Paid Media Spend Snapshot – June 2023
Methodology: For these benchmarks, only Skai accounts with spend above a minimum threshold for the previous three months are included. Starting with the January 2023 release, spending benchmarks will once again use total monthly spend to ensure consistency across chart segments. Please note that the selection criteria used here are different from the Skai Quarterly Trends Report, and as a result may not be consistent with those results in all cases.
How to read these charts.
Accounts are divided into four 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, while bubbles below the diagonal mean that volume grew slower.
Paid Search
Overall paid search spending decreased by 1% in June, while average CPC increased by 5%. Average spending per day rose by 2%.
- 29% of search accounts spent more in June than May compared to 45% who spent less, and the average price of a click increased for 37% of accounts and decreased for 32%, 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 22% of all paid search accounts in the analysis. Another 44% showed no change in either spending levels OR the price per click.
Social Advertising
Overall, paid social spending dropped 4% in June, while average CPM decreased 1%. Average spending per day dipped 1%.
- 36% of social accounts spent more in June than May compared to 44% who spent less, and the average price of one thousand impressions increased for 42% of accounts and decreased for 32%, 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 spending decreased, but CPM increased, which comprised 18% of all paid social accounts in the analysis. Another 39% showed no change in either spending levels OR the price per thousand impressions.
Retail Media
Retail media spending grew by 1% in June, while average CPC increased by 4%. Average spending per day rose 5%.
- 40% of retail media accounts spent more in June than May compared to 35% who spent less, and the average price of a click increased for 42% of accounts and decreased by 21%, 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 spend and CPC increased, which comprised 25% of all retail media accounts in the analysis. Another 50% 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.
And please visit the Skai blog and Research & Reports page for ongoing insights, analysis, and interviews on all things related to digital advertising.
