Amazon advertising spend surges as Google, others, experience downturn
By Oluwaseyi Lawal
Digital advertising growth across various platforms is slowing down, with Amazon Sponsored Products being a notable exception.
In Q3, its growth rate surged to 15%, almost double the 8% recorded in the previous quarter.
Amazon’s Sponsored Products saw a 29% increase during the Prime Day event compared to last year’s two-day event in July.
Google’s paid search advertising, including text ads and shopping, grew by 11%, down from 14% in Q2. However, spending on shopping campaigns increased by 16%, remaining consistent with the previous quarter.
The introduction of Google’s AI Overviews in May appears to have impacted click-through rates (CTRs) across different ad categories.
In a report by Mediapost, according to data released on Wednesday, Tinuiti clients experienced declines. The non-brand keyword segment on mobile saw the most significant drop, with CTRs decreasing by 14% from April to its lowest point in July.
AI Overviews tended to appear more frequently for non-brand searches and occupied a greater portion of the screen on mobile devices, which initially contributed to lower click-through rates (CTRs) for text ads.
However, CTRs showed improvement across different devices and keyword categories in August and September. Although the non-brand mobile segment’s CTR is still 4% below its level in April 2024, it has increased by 6% since the start of 2023.
“At the same we saw a drop in non-branded text ads clickthrough rates on phones, standard Shopping campaigns improved,” said Andy Taylor, vice president of research at Tinuiti. “These campaign types play in the same auctions, and sometimes it’s the case that one campaign type can start to take precedence over another where one clickthrough rate could go up and the other down. In the past few months, we have seen an improvement.”
The Tinuiti Digital Ads Benchmark Report draws from anonymized data on advertising programs managed by the agency, which oversees over $4 billion in annual digital ad spending.
The report covered traditional paid search, paid social, and commerce media, with notable trends emerging in video and display advertising, including platforms like YouTube and Netflix.
The data revealed fluctuations in YouTube ad spending, which grew by 11% in Q3 2024, a drop from the 28% growth recorded in the previous quarter. In Q2, a surge in impressions led to increased spending while driving down average CPMs. The report indicates that the slower growth in Q3 aligns more closely with YouTube’s official revenue figures and reflects stronger year-over-year comparisons.
Taylor said, “It speaks to how it’s becoming even more viewed how folks will access through television sets. YouTube still lags on other streaming platforms in terms of spend going on televisions. We’ve seen TV-screen growth outpace that of other device types for YouTube for the last several quarters.”
The agency observed a significant increase in YouTube TV ad spending across other devices, with TV screens making up 34% of YouTube ad expenditure in Q3 2024, compared to 30% in the same period the previous year.
Spending on YouTube ads for TVs grew by 24% year-over-year (YoY), more than double the growth rate seen for other devices.
YouTube ad spending on mobile phones increased by 10% YoY in Q3, though the share of spending on phones dropped slightly from 50% in Q3 2023 to 49% in Q3 2024. Tablets experienced the biggest decline, with their share of ad spend falling from 8% in Q3 2023 to 6% in Q3 2024.
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