Financial services comparison site MoneySupermarket and online retailer Amazon top the ranking for Google AdWords spend, according to new research.
Financial services comparison site MoneySupermarket and online retailer Amazon top the ranking for Google AdWords spend, according to new research.
The study, from AdGooroo, found that from January to June 2014, advertisers spent a total of £783 million on Desktop/Tablet Paid Search advertising, not including Mobile Search or Product Listing Ads.
The vast majority of the Paid Search advertising expenditure—£742 million—went to U.K. Google AdWords, with an additional £41 million going to the U.K. Yahoo! Bing Network.
Key highlights of the study into the UK Paid Search market:
Top 20 Advertisers
• Online Gambling and Financial Services account for more than half of the Top 20 advertisers – five Financial Services Comparison Sites and six Online Gambling sites feature in the ranking of the Top 20 advertisers. The nine remaining sites in the ranking were in the retail (3 sites), travel (1) Insurance (1), Television (1), Banking/Financial Institution (1) and Telecommunications providers (2) categories.
• TescoBank.com is the only banking/financial institution in the Top 20 – Tesco may be better known for its supermarket chain, but the company’s consumer banking site is the only banking/financial institution in the Top 20, suggesting a concerted effort to gain a foothold over its competitors.
Top Spending Categories
• Financial Services is the highest spending category in UK Paid Search (£158 million), followed by Shopping & Classifieds, which mainly consists of retailers (£100 million), Travel (£96 million) and then the Adult category, 96% of which is spend by Online Gambling sites (£74 million).
Top 20 Keywords
• Gambling-related keywords the most expensive – There are five gambling-related keywords in the list (‘online casino’, ‘casino’, ‘bingo’, ‘online casino games’ and ‘roulette’) which average a £36.90 Cost Per Click (CPC), the highest average CPC of any industry category. The term online casino’ has most expensive average CPC: £52.72.
• ‘Samsung Galaxy s5’ ranked 3rd in Top 20 UK paid search keywords – Despite media reports that sales of this highly anticipated smartphone were disappointing, the keyword ranked #3 in paid search spend, with £4.7 million for the first half of this year. It’s also the only actual consumer product found in the Top 20 Keywords.
• The top paid search keyword was ‘car insurance’, for which advertisers spent £7 million in the first half of the year. Notably, insurance keywords saw extremely high competition, averaging 83 advertisers bidding on each term.
• ‘Payday loans’ #5 Top UK search term – terms such as ‘payday loan’ and ‘wonga’ were #5 and #17 respectively in the list of the top UK search terms, reflecting a high level of interest in this growing online finance category.
• The branded term ‘asos’ had the highest average Clickthrough Rate/CTR – Nearly one in every five people (18.13%) who searched for apparel retailer Asos clicked a related ad. The term also had the lowest average Cost Per Click/CPC (£0.34).
The full research report is available here.