It's been three years since Bing started powering all searches through Yahoo! and the fruits of that partnership are beginning to ripen with success. While the two have yet to really rake away much of Google's claim of the search market, the two companies still claimed acquired the highest market share of their partnership.
In a release from IgnitionOne, Yahoo!/Bing produced signs of a promising year with a 46.4% increase in U.S. search advertising spend year-over-year, which was just shy of doubling Google's lesser growth of 26.6%. And while Q1 search spend is normally down quarter over quarter due to the spike in holiday spending in Q4, Yahoo!/Bing posted a 14.3% increase in spend versus Google's decrease quarter-over-quarter of 5.4%. The duo's splendid quarter may be attributed to Yahoo!/Bing's push for increased utilization of broad match keywords, which leads to more competition in auctions. Also, as mentioned above this quarter marked the groups' highest market share claim in nearly two years with 21.2% of the market share – the best showing since the two companies partnered up.
According to Roger Barnette, President of IgnitionOne, the Q1 showing by Yahoo! and Bing was a remarkable success. "The Yahoo!/Bing turnaround was arguably the most interesting Q1 with an uptick coming primarily from the adoption of broad match targeting by marketers," he said in a statement.
Yahoo! and Bing's resurgence wasn't acquired solely through people glued to the monitors of their computers – many of those people had tablets and smartphones stuck to their face. In fact, mobile search accounted for 12.3% of total search advertising spend in Q1, holding steady following an impressive Q4. Mobile clicks were up 246.1% YoY, showing acceleration over the last quarter. Impressions were up 119.9% and ad spend was up 221.1% YoY, but both showed slower growth than the preceding quarter. Much of the mobile search activity can be attributed to tablet devices which accounted for 67.4% of total mobile search advertising budgets for the quarter. In addition, tablet click through rates of 3.1% were higher than those for PC of 2.5%.
"I am impressed by the level of activity and click-throughs on tablets," Barnette added about the mobile ad growth. "This should be a wakeup call for marketers who are not yet leveraging search advertising on these devices."
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