Spending and Pricing Trends Across Retail Media, Paid Search and Social Advertising

February 2024 spending was lower than January across all channels, but only because February had two fewer days than the previous month. When we look at average daily spend, there wasn't more than a one percent change in either direction.

Ad prices showed modest month-over-month increases in retail media and paid social, but dipped slightly in paid search. Paid social advertisers whose spending and CPM went down in February still saw a CPM increase in aggregate, indicating a wide range of actual CPM values across a small number of advertisers in that category.

How do you measure up? Check out these benchmarks to see if your programs are on par with your industry peers, ahead, or behind the curve ??

Monthly Industry Snapshot – February 2024

Methodology: Only Skai accounts with spend above a minimum threshold for the previous three months are included in these benchmarks. Please note that the selection criteria used here differ from the Skai Quarterly Trends Report and may not be consistent with those results in all cases. Starting in November 2023, paid social data has been expanded to include Meta, Pinterest, TikTok, LinkedIn, and YouTube.

How to read these charts:

Accounts are divided into segments based on increases or decreases of at least 5% in monthly spending and CPC for retail media and paid search or CPM for paid social. Those segments are then plotted on a bubble chart where the x-axis represents the month-over-month (MoM) percent change in pricing for that segment, and the y-axis is the MoM percent change in total spending. Bubble size represents the percent of total Skai accounts.

The diagonal line indicates spending changes that are completely described by the change in pricing. Bubbles above the diagonal mean that ad volume - clicks for retail media and paid search, impressions for paid social - grew faster than pricing. In contrast, bubbles below the diagonal mean that volume grew slower.

Retail Media?

Overall, retail media spending decreased 5% in February, while average CPC increased 4%. Average spending per day rose 1%.

• 28% of retail media accounts spent more in February than in January compared to 55% who spent less, and the average price of a click increased for 32% of accounts and decreased for 29%, with the remaining share for each metric seeing no change.

• Of the segments that showed movement in both spending and pricing, the largest was where both spend and CPC decreased, which comprised 22% of all retail media accounts in the analysis. Another 47% showed no change in either spending levels or the price per click.

Paid Search?

Overall paid search spending decreased 7% in February, while average CPC dropped 2%. Average spending per day dipped 1%.

• 26% of search accounts spent more in February than January compared to 43% who spent less, and the average price of a click increased for 36% of accounts and decreased for 33%, with the remaining share for each metric seeing no change.

• Of the segments that showed movement in both spending and pricing, the largest was where both spend and CPC decreased, which comprised 21% of all paid search accounts in the analysis. Another 50% showed no change in either spending levels or the price per click.

Social Advertising

Overall, paid social spending dropped 8% in February, while average CPM grew 5%. Average spending per day dipped 1%.

• 45% of social accounts spent more in February than January compared to 43% who spent less, and the average price of one thousand impressions increased for 58% of accounts and decreased for 21%, with the remaining share for each metric seeing no change.
• Of the segments that showed movement in both spending and pricing, the largest was where spend decreased but CPM increased, which comprised 26% of all paid social accounts in the analysis. Another 31% showed no change in either spending levels or the price per thousand impressions

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Come back next month for the most up-to-date data. Until then, you can dive into more of our research via our Quarterly Trends Reports hub.

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