Chris "Coz" Costello
Senior Director of Marketing Research @ Skai
Spending and Pricing Trends Across Paid Search, Social Advertising, and Retail Media
Social media spending continued its upward trend in September, increasing 11% from August in aggregate, with 2 in 5 accounts seeing a month-over-month. Paid search spending grew 4%, while retail media was largely flat across both spending and unit pricing.
Changes in ad prices for both social media and paid search largely mirrored spending increases versus last month, suggesting that impression and click volume grew in those channels, respectively. 4 out of 10 retail media advertisers saw no change in CPC from August to September. 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 – September 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 grew 4% in September, while average CPC increased 4%. Average spending per day rose 7%.
30% of search accounts spent more in September than in August compared to 42% who spent less, and the average price of a click increased for 46% of accounts and decreased for 25%, 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 increased, which comprised 21% of all paid search accounts in the analysis. Another 47% showed no change in either spending levels OR the price per click.
Social Advertising
Overall, paid social spending increased 11% in September, while average CPM grew 10%. Average spending per day rose 15%.
39% of social accounts spent more in September than in August compared to 44% who spent less, and the average price of one thousand impressions increased for 44% of accounts and decreased for 24%, 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 increased, which comprised 20% of all paid social accounts in the analysis. Another 42% showed no change in either spending levels OR the price per thousand impressions.
Retail Media
Overall, retail media spending decreased 3% in September, while average CPC increased 2%. Average spending per day was flat.
33% of retail media accounts spent more in September than in August, compared to 44% who spent less, and the average price of a click increased for 36% of accounts and decreased for 23%, 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 increased, which comprised 19% of all retail media accounts in the analysis. Another 52% 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.
