Advertisers on Marin’s management platform grew Q4 spend by 53% YoY on the Yahoo! Bing Network
Kye Mou, Product Marketing Manager, Marin SoftwareEditor’s Note: This is another in a series of posts by members of the Yahoo!-Bing Preferred Partner Program, a group of leading SEM technology experts. Marin Software is a leading provider of online advertising management solutions, offering an integrated platform for managing search, display, mobile, and social marketing. Kye Mou, Product Marketing Manager at Marin Software, discusses Yahoo! Bing Network trends and findings from Marin’s Q4 2012 Research Brief.
Each quarter, Marin Software conducts a study of U.S. trends in paid search and mobile. Our Q4 2012 findings, which are presented in our most recent Research Brief, show online advertising trends over the 2012 holiday season, as well as specific insights into the paid search industry. The data consists of medians and indexed values across our customer base from October through December of 2012.
The study includes insights on the Yahoo! Bing Network, where Marin Software clients saw substantial increases in investment and performance across their paid search campaigns. These trends indicate a growth in search activity during the holiday season, the successful adoption of new ad features, and efficiency gains in optimizing paid search campaigns.
During the holiday season, expected increases in competition and revenue-per-click (RPC) on the Yahoo! Bing Network resulted in advertisers increasing search bids to capture a larger share of revenue. This led to an increase in cost-per-click and spend quarter over quarter (QoQ). As expected, the number of searches also grew in Q4; but, despite the increase in impression volume, Marin users were able to remain efficient by engaging customers with highly relevant ad creative. The utilization of promotional offers and discounts during the holidays, along with targeted keywords, contributed to the increase in click-through rate QoQ.
In analyzing annual trends, our study found a 53% increase in Q4 spend on the Yahoo! Bing Network year over year (YoY) coupled with a 22% increase in cost-per-click. Though we expect incremental growth in spend YoY due to expanding search budgets and increased competition during the holiday season, the pace at which spend is increasing YoY suggests that online advertisers are expanding their campaigns and investing more budget across the Yahoo! Bing Network.
We expect this trend to carry into 2013 as the Yahoo! Bing Network continues to introduce new features that improve the experience between publisher, advertiser, and user.
In 2012, search marketers advertising on the Yahoo! Bing Network were introduced to improved negative keyword logic and sitelink extensions, among other features. For Marin users, these features provided additional control over their paid search campaigns. The ability to implement a more effective negative keyword strategy enabled search marketers to eliminate unwanted clicks and reach their target audience across the Yahoo! Bing Network; contributing to a 13% increase in click-through rate YoY.
This increase in Q4 performance was further augmented by the ability to assign sitelink extensions to ad creative. These deep links allowed search marketers to include additional messaging and more relevant content during the holiday season, contributing to the increase in clicks and click-through rate YoY.
As more discretionary spend is allocated towards paid search each year, and with the Yahoo! Bing Network continuing to invest in search technology, we expect search marketers to become increasingly confident in their ability to drive more revenue through their campaigns and as a result, allocate more budget toward the Yahoo! Bing Network. Furthermore, the ability to scale campaign management and optimization strategies (e.g. maintaining publisher parity) using an online advertising management solution, will increasingly drive additional spend towards expanding Bing Ads campaigns.
To capitalize on these revenue opportunities in 2013, it will be critical for online marketers to invest in a solution that meets the unique workflow, analytics, and optimization requirements their paid search programs demand.
