Mobile Accounts For 38% Of Paid Search Clicks In UK

Mobile continues to grow in importance for advertisers and in the second quarter of 2014, mobile accounted for 38% of paid search clicks in the UK, as well as for 26% of all paid search spend in the country.

Both numbers, released by marketing software firm Kenshoo, are the highest recorded in history. In the words of the company’s EMEA marketing director Justin Thorne, one explanation for the growing share of mobile search ad spend and clicks can be that it is driven by the simplified process for creating campaigns through Google AdWords.

Beyond mobile, overall search ad expenditure in the EMEA region — which consists of Europe, the Middle East and Africa — grew by 24% year-on-year in the second quarter of 2014. Sales revenue from paid search grew proportionally by 23%. The fact that the two seem to grow together, leads Kenshoo to conclude that advertisers have improved the targeting of their ads and increased the efficiency of their campaigns.

This, in turn, has caused the average cost-per-click (CPC) of search advertising to rise slightly — from EUR0.38 (£0.30) in 2013 to EUR0.43 (£0.34). In the UK that cost was slightly higher — EUR0.47 (£0.37) — but the investment was justified by a click-through-rate (CTR) of 1.9%.

For comparison, the nation where paid search advertising was most efficient was Germany with a CPC of EUR0.31 (£0.25) and CTR of 2%. France, on the other hand, had a CPC of EUR0.45 (£0.36), which is close to the average for the whole region, but CTR was just 0.7% — something that Kenshoo believes it due to French consumer’s wariness before clicking ads.