Canadian advertisers are on track to invest 51.1% of their mobile budgets in search this year, reaching $803 million, according to a new report from eMarketer.
That’s a significantly larger share than in the U.S., where advertisers have shown display advertising more favour, the research firm says. EMarketer projects the U.S. will spend 44.7% of its mobile budget in search this year.
The report, Canada Mobile Search: Marketers Shift Investments to Follow Consumer Behaviour, shows that mobile search spend in Canada more than doubled in 2014, and nearly tripled the year before.
Going forward, eMarketer projects steady continued growth, topping $2 billion by 2018.
The report shows that Canadian advertisers are gradually transitioning their desktop search programs into mobile, but they still lag consumer adoption. Currently, Canada spends a third (32.8%) of all its search dollars in mobile.
Consumers, meanwhile, perform more than half of Google searches on mobile. By 2018, the share of search ad spend going to mobile will grow to two thirds (67.7%), though there are no projections for what users’ cross-device activity will look like at that time.
Despite growing emphasis on programmatic display and video media, search remains the number one online advertising channel by revenue in Canada. According to IAB Canada’s annual revenue survey, released in June, advertisers spent $2.1 billion on search across mobile and desktop last year, or 55% of all Internet ad revenue. Search spend grew 14% between 2013 and 2014.
