Over break I was explaining this class to my parents, and they replied that it sounded like this class should be for computer science majors, since we are learning how to optimize websites. I then explained to them how this class is dual labeled as both MARK 330 and ENTR 330, and that this content is extremely relevant for marketers, especially in todays era of digital marketing. As we have continued talking about the power of search and the dominance of the four main search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo), I wanted to further explore the implications for marketers.
Search advertising, and paid search are not types of organic SEO, but I still think that they are relevant topics to explore for the sake of this blog post. This graph from Statista shows the Search advertising spending in the United States 2019 to 2025.
Even just at the first glance you can tell that search advertising is increasing, going from $54.8B in 2019, to over doubling at $123.6B in 2024. These numbers illustrate that more and more people are spending on advertising, which suggests that search advertising is a profitable endeavor. This hypothesis is backed by the chart below that shows revenue from search advertising and projected growth.
Both of these seems to correspond with the overall increase in search usage, especially with COVID-19 and the increase in e-commerce. There was search advertising revenue growth of 38.33% in 2021, a significant increase compared to growth rates of 18.7% in 2020 and 10.2% in 2022.
Some other statistics from this study that I thought were interesting were that in 2023, Google blocked 5.5 billon ads from being shown. Additionally, the average cost-per-click in 2023 was $1.99. Finally, I also thought that it was interesting that the amount spent towards search advertising was different between mobile and desktop. In 2023, $70.8B was spent on mibile, and $47.3B was spent on desktop. While it does make sense to me that mobile would have more ads, I didn’t expect there to be such a large difference between the two.
Did any of these marketing related numbers surprise you?
2 Responses
This is so interesting! I do agree, that at some times SEO can feel like the back end of computers and sort of “programming” search engines. It is baffling to me the amount of money spent on just search advertising alone. It is a reminder that there is so much money to be made in the world of online marketing and SEO.
Very good data that is used to explain the recent trends. I think it is also interesting that there was more money spent on mobile than desktop. Mobile is definitely something that is being focused on more by advertisers and users are using it more to search