Retailers rely on mobile advertising

Almost half of the advertising money (40 percent) that retailers will spend on online advertising in the fourth quarter of 2016 will go to mobile advertising. 37 percent of paid search clicks will be generated with shopping ads in the same period. At the same time, social network clicks and budget share will settle at a steady level. These are the findings of The State of Shopping Ads: 2016 Cross-Channel Marketing Report, presented by Marin Software on Friday.

The study forecasts activities of influential online stores in paid search and mobile for the fourth quarter of 2016 and provides specific recommendations for action for the shopping season at the end of the year.

"Publishers like Google and Facebook are constantly developing new formats and features that offer retail advertisers new target groups and revenue streams," explains Marcus Thümmler, Team Lead Product Consulting DACH & EE at Marin Software. "Consumers also benefit from this, because firstly, it tailors the shopping experience even more precisely to them. Second, in a mobile world, they can click and buy even more easily at the right moment for them."

The study, "The State of Shopping Ads: 2016 Cross-Channel Marketing Report," is based on data collected worldwide from the Marin Global Online Advertising Index, which summarizes the advertising companies that manage more than seven billion US dollars of advertising budget annually via the Marin platform. For this analysis, retailers spending more than $100'000 per month on text ads on Google and Bing and on Product Listing Ads (PLAs), now called Shopping Ads, were evaluated. As a result, the data and findings apply predominantly to the performance of large retailers and may not show performance trends for smaller companies. However, the scope and diversity of the data allows for a robust analysis of shopping ad performance.

The complete report volume, "The State of Shopping Ads: 2016 Cross-Channel Marketing Report," can be here downloaded free of charge.