Spending and Pricing Trends Across Paid Search, Social Advertising, and Retail Media
Prime Day giveth, and Prime Day taketh away, as 68% of retail media accounts on Skai spent less in August than July, leading to a 26% drop in total spending. Paid search spending was down by just 2% with equal shares of accounts increasing and decreasing budgets, while paid social spending increased 8% month-over-month.
Paid search CPC and paid social CPM both increased 3%, while the pricing premiums from Prime Day also receded, lowering the average cost per click in retail media by 13%. More than half of retail media accounts saw a lower CPC in the month.
How do you measure up? Check out these benchmarks to see if your programs are on par with your industry peers, ahead of the curve, 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 – August 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.
Retail Media
Overall, retail media spending decreased 26% in August, while average CPC dropped 13%. Average spending per day dipped 26%.
- 19% of retail media accounts spent more in August than July compared to 68% who spent less, and the average price of a click increased for 17% of accounts and decreased for 54%, 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 decreased, which comprised 47% of all retail media accounts in the analysis. Another 34% showed no change in either spending levels OR the price per click.
Paid Search
Overall paid search spending decreased 2% in August, while average CPC increased 3%. Average spending per day dipped 2%.]
- 34% of search accounts spent more in August than July compared to 34% who spent less, and the average price of a click increased for 29% of accounts and decreased for 36%, 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 decreased, which comprised 19% of all paid search accounts in the analysis. Another 50% showed no change in either spending levels OR the price per click.
Social Advertising
Overall, paid social spending increased 8% in August, while average CPM grew 3%. Average spending per day rose 8%.
- 45% of social accounts spent more in August than July compared to 43% who spent less, and the average price of one thousand impressions increased for 42% of accounts and decreased for 31%, 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 spend decreased but CPM increased, which comprised 19% of all paid social accounts in the analysis. Another 35% showed no change in either spending levels OR the price per thousand impressions.
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.
