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Key Q4 2025 digital marketing trends

Here are some of the key digital marketing trends from Q4 2025's advertising data.


Retail media posted its biggest quarter in six years with spend rising 33% year over year, while clicks climbed 34% and cost-per-click dropped 1%. Upper-funnel DSP investment surged 72% as brands moved beyond testing into aggressive full-funnel scaling. Half of Amazon advertisers now run DSP campaigns.
Paid search showed signs of mounting pressure with 7% spend growth but CPCs climbing 16% while impressions and clicks both declined. Marketers are paying more for less volume as AI-driven discovery captures demand earlier in the funnel. Performance Max adopters now direct 65% of their spend to the format.
Paid social delivered its best efficiency quarter since before iOS 14 with spend up 9%, clicks surging 23%, and CPMs dropping 6%. Platform algorithms have finally stabilized after years of volatility. TikTok adoption reached 50% of advertisers, moving firmly into the mainstream.
AI-powered shopping went mainstream during the holidays. Salesforce reported that AI-referred shoppers converted at 9x the rate of social referrals, while retailers deploying AI agents saw 59% higher growth rates. Adobe found traffic from AI services jumped 800% on Black Friday.
Marketer AI usage shifted dramatically from creative to strategy. Analysis from Skai's GenAI marketing agent found that strategy and planning queries hit 35.5% of prompts in Q4, while creative requests fell to just 3%. Marketers are using AI to decide where to put their money, not to write their ads.

The Q4 2025 Quarterly Trends Report

Discover comprehensive quarter-over-quarter and year-over-year digital advertising performance insights from Q4 2025, featuring:

  • Performance metrics: Detailed analysis of retail media's historic 33% growth, paid search's rising cost pressures amid declining volume, and paid social's best efficiency quarter since iOS 14 with cost breakdowns and channel-level insights.
  • Retail media deep dive: Platform-by-platform breakdown of Amazon and Walmart performance, DSP's 72% surge and 24% cost compression, format-level dynamics, and how smaller networks outpaced the big two during the holidays.
  • AI-powered shopping analysis: How AI search channels, shopping agents, and retailer-deployed AI reshaped holiday performance, including Salesforce and Adobe data on conversion rates, traffic growth, and what it signals for 2026.
  • Forward-looking insights: Q1 planning strategies, DSP scaling frameworks, AI capability roadmaps, and how to build always-on infrastructure before your competitors do.

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