We also noticed retailers were promoting their offers earlier in the season. Click growth had its highest month in October, as many consumers were guided into shopping earlier as the news advised of supply chain issues. The monthly YoY trends in Q3 and Q4 of 2021 also show an interesting view. Earlier Retail Offers Influence Holiday Shopping CPCs will continue to rise, so understanding the total value of return from your marketing is key. Such as catalog requests, email sign-ups, offline engagements, and transactions. KEY TAKEAWAY: Continue to maximize return on ad spend (ROAS), but don’t forget to drive consumer experiences that may also lead to sales. The past two years show consistent overall growth for Google Search and Shopping, concluding that consumers increasingly shop, research, and find what they’re looking for online. The above graphs show a YoY increase in CPCs however, we must keep in mind that some changes driven by the pandemic were due to more temporary changes like less competition for CPCs with Amazon and brick-and-mortar retailers being out of the equation. As we compare spend, click, and CPC from 2021 to Q3 and Q4 in 2019, we notice CPCs are up a very reasonable 10% in Q3 and less than 2% in Q4. Google Spend, CPC, and Clicks 2019-2020 YoY ComparisonĪs we look more specifically at 2021’s Q3 and Q4 and compare those numbers to the “before” times of 2019, we see the strong acceleration in CPCs isn’t as significant of a challenge. As consumers spend more time online, it’s important to help scale the bottom of the funnel through upper-level awareness. KEY TAKEAWAY: Continue to focus on maximizing the bottom of the funnel. Combined with a slightly reduced CPC growth, it drove a 40% growth in spend. We ended Q4 with click growth slowing down YoY to more normal levels but still growing nearly 12%. But it’s important to understand what we’re comparing against and the sheer volume of consumers (and traffic/clicks) who have moved online and continue to transact online. As we moved forward in the year, some very tough competitors were making click growth look negative or mediocre in contrast to the boom year of 2020. We started the year looking at a solid growth in clicks with modest year-over-year (YoY) increases in CPCs. Moving forward into Q1 of 2021, we see the impact of our trends as contrasted against a volatile pandemic-driven 2020. Cost per click (CPC) dropped as Amazon and brick-and-mortar advertisers came out of the auction, and other retailers faced supply chain issues. Rapid growth in clicks occurred as the pandemic ramped up in Q2 of 2020 while we were sheltering in place, and as consumers, we moved all of our retail buying behavior online. When we look at the overall year trends for 2021 compared to 2020, we can see the vast difference in the two years’ performance. Seven-Day Rolling Average, Aligned by ThanksgivingĬomparing Google Search Trends from 2021 to 2020.Device Cost Per Click and Revenue Per Click Performance.Mobile Usage Among Consumers Continues to Grow.Earlier Retail Offers Influence Holiday Shopping.Google Spend, CPC, and Clicks 2019-2020 YoY Comparison.Comparing Google Search Trends from 2021 to 2020.Looking back to a pre-pandemic 2019 helped us understand the changes we saw in the 2020 landscape to give advertisers insight into where to go from here. As we reviewed these data points from 2021, we evaluated the context of multiple years of data. We think of Google Search as the channel so driven by customer intent that it helps us understand changing consumer behavior. The last two years have been anything but ordinary, but it bears repeating when looking at performance marketing data – specifically Google Search trends.
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