Q2 2026 Reveals Ad Spend Surge Across Channels as AI Reshapes Commerce Media
Explore a comprehensive analysis of performance metrics, format-level movement, and strategic forecasts across retail media, paid search, and paid social. Access the full report to see how spend, clicks, and cost diverged by channel in Q2, and what those patterns mean for Q3 planning and the holidays ahead.
Here are some of the key digital marketing trends from Q2 2026 advertising data.
Amazon DSP Scaled Up and Got Cheaper at the Same Time. Clicks more than doubled, up 127% year over year. CPC fell 35% while spend rose 48%. During Prime Day alone, DSP’s share of Amazon Ads investment jumped from 17.9% to 25.5%.
Retail Media Held Its Price Through the Biggest Prime Day Yet. Spend rose 26% year over year and clicks rose 27%, while CPC stayed within a few cents of a dollar for a seventh straight year. Prime Day pushed the channel further: blended CPC hit a record-low $1.63 and CTR hit a record high.
Paid Social’s Clicks Jumped 53% While Cost Per Click Fell 18%. CPM rose just 9%, so the gains came from creative and targeting, not cheaper impressions. CTR climbed 33% year over year. TikTok now takes about 17% of social budgets.
Paid Search Costs Rose Because the Pool of Clicks Got Smaller. Spend climbed 17% year over year, but clicks grew just 2% as impressions fell 6%. CPC rose 14%, the price of holding the same traffic in a market where AI answers resolve more queries before a click happens.
Media Teams Are Ready to Try Agents. Few Are Ready to Run Them. Skai’s new State of Agentic Readiness for Media Teams study surveyed 332 paid-media practitioners and found a mean readiness score of just 35.7 out of 100. Seventy-nine percent scored below the “Building” tier.
In this report:
Discover comprehensive quarter-over-quarter and year-over-year digital advertising performance insights from Q2 2026, featuring:
- Performance Metrics and Growth Analysis. Detailed analysis of retail media’s 26% spend growth, paid search’s cost increases against falling impressions, and paid social’s clicks-up-costs-down quarter.
- Retail Media Deep Dive. Platform-by-platform detail on Amazon and Walmart, Amazon DSP’s breakout quarter, and category-level spend and cost patterns across the channel.
- Paid Search and Social Analysis. How search advertisers are responding to record CPC, Performance Max and AI Max adoption trends, and TikTok’s widening gap between budget share and attention share.
- AI and Agentic Commerce. How consumers are discovering products through conversational AI, what Skai’s new State of Agentic Readiness for Media Teams study found, and the moves that marketers need to make next.
- Forward-Looking Insights for Q3 and Beyond. Q3 planning priorities, how to apply the Prime Day blueprint to Q4 tentpoles, and the measurement and data foundations to put in place before holiday scaling begins.