Keep the Car Running

Imagine you are driving a car. Imagine that, in order to get better performance on the road, the car manufacturer provides you with a better set of tires. Now imagine that you have to change the tires on your car while it’s still moving. And yet, you are able to make this switch and actually make the car go faster.

Pretty impressive trick, right?

That’s essentially what digital marketers have been doing over the last year or so, and probably even longer. Search and social marketing are constantly evolving, and yet continue to grow at double-digit rates compared to the same period one year ago, as Skai has reported in our latest infographic, the Q2 2016 Digital Marketing Snapshot.

Take, for example, the rise of Dynamic Ads for Product on the social side. Since its introduction last year, the share of spend for this type of ad among eCommerce advertiser has gotten within shouting distance of Shopping Campaigns in search, which is a much more “mature” ad type, at least relatively speaking.

Put simply, the very existence of an ad type that focuses on showing retail products pushes advertisers towards better tracking of online sales, and with better tracking comes measurement of ROI. Taking it one step further, ROI of Dynamic Ads for Products has looked better than that for regular Page Posts, making the decision to invest somewhat obvious.

A similar phenomenon is playing out with Lead Ads and political advertisers, where these advertisers have 2X the impressions and 4X the clicks in Q2 for Lead Ads, which debuted in late 2015, than other types of advertisers.

In both cases, we see an ad type well-suited to a particular marketer and a particular audience that attracts investment and grows overall spend on the channel. For social, this was to the tune of a 46% year-over-year (YoY) increase in spend compared to Q2 of last year.

The story for search continues to be about mobile and about shopping campaigns, and also about mobile shopping campaigns. When it comes to making the search car move faster, these have been the key drivers (sorry!) for most of our recent reports, and this quarter is no exception.

The flip side of this growth is that it’s all contributing to the continuing evolution of the search channel. Paid search is no longer just about searching for keywords on desktop computers. In fact, if you look at the total share of shopping campaigns and mobile search, that share is now the majority of both impressions and clicks, and is close to making up the majority of search spend.

And despite all of this, search still grew by 10% in Q2 when compared to the same quarter last year. Now that’s how you keep the car running.