Navigate the Evolving Digital Advertising Landscape with AI Insights and Market Intelligence
Explore a comprehensive analysis of performance metrics, AI-powered shopping trends, and strategic forecasts across retail media, paid search, and paid social. Access the full report to uncover the spending patterns, efficiency gains, and market shifts that will define commerce media in 2026.
Here are some of the key digital marketing trends from Q4 2025’s advertising data.
Retail Media Posted Its Biggest Quarter in Six Years. Spend rose 33% year over year with clicks up 34% and CPCs down 1%. Upper-funnel DSP investment surged 72% while costs fell 24%. Brands aren’t testing full-funnel retail media anymore. They’re scaling it aggressively.
AI-Powered Shopping Went Mainstream. Traffic from AI search channels doubled YoY. Salesforce found AI-referred shoppers converted 9x more than social referrals, and retailers with AI agents saw 59% higher growth. The consumer side of AI moved faster than most marketers expected.
Paid Search Costs Are Climbing as AI Captures Demand Earlier. Spend grew 7% but CPCs jumped 16% while volume declined. Marketers are paying more for less as AI-driven discovery intercepts shoppers earlier in the funnel. The efficiency math is tightening.
Paid Social Finally Delivered the Numbers Marketers Have Been Waiting For. Spend up 9%, clicks up 23%, CPMs down 6%. This was the best efficiency quarter since before iOS 14. TikTok hit 50% adoption, cementing its place in mainstream social strategy.
Marketers Stopped Using AI for Ads and Started Using It for Decisions. Strategy and planning queries hit 35.5% of prompts in Q4. Creative requests fell to 3%. The shift from content generation to strategic decision-making is accelerating.
In this report:
Discover comprehensive quarter-over-quarter and year-over-year digital advertising performance insights from Q4 2025, featuring:
- Performance Metrics and Growth Analysis. Detailed analysis of retail media’s historic 33% growth, paid search’s rising cost pressures, and paid social’s post-iOS 14 efficiency recovery with cost breakdowns and channel-level insights.
- Retail Media Deep Dive. Platform-by-platform analysis of Amazon and Walmart performance, DSP adoption trends, format-level cost dynamics, and how smaller retail media networks grew faster than the big two during the holidays.
- AI Integration and Workflow Maturity. Analysis of how AI has transitioned from experimental tool to integrated infrastructure, including strategy and planning shifts, performance insights acceleration, and what successful AI integration actually looks like.
- AI-Powered Shopping Analysis. Comprehensive look at how AI search channels, shopping agents, and retailer-deployed AI drove holiday performance, including conversion data, traffic growth, and what it means for 2026 planning.
- Marketer AI Usage Patterns. Analysis of how AI usage shifted from creative tasks to strategic planning, with data from Skai’s GenAI marketing agent showing where marketers are finding real value.
- Category-Level Dynamics. Industry-specific performance across retail media, paid search, and paid social, revealing where competition is intensifying and where efficiency opportunities remain.
- Forward-Looking Insights for 2026. Q1 planning strategies, DSP scaling frameworks, AI capability roadmaps, and how to build the always-on infrastructure that will separate leaders from followers this year.