The Ultimate List of 97 PPC Statistics to Supercharge Your Paid Marketing Campaigns in 2022

We put together this list of the latest, up-to-date PPC statistics to provide the insights you need to understand the different pay-per-click platforms and learn how to use them to catapult your business to the next level.

PPC advertising is a multi-billion dollar industry that’s used by the biggest corporations on the planet and that little mom-and-pop shop right down the street from you.

Hundreds of thousands of businesses are using it and you want to know why? It works!

However, not everyone knows what they’re doing and that’s why we hand-picked these PPC statistics to help bring you into our little circle of trust.

• PPC Marketing Statistics List
• 1. General PPC Statistics
• 2. PPC Budget Stats
• 3. PPC Management Stats
• 4. User Engagement Stats
• 5. Display Ad PPC statistics
• 6. Ad Block Stats
• 7. Mobile PPC Statistics
• 8. Local PPC Stats
• 9. Social PPC Statistics
• 10. YouTube Ad Statistics
• 11. Amazon PPC Statistics

A lot of PPC stats floating around out there are 5 years old (or more!) and are completely irrelevant in the current pay-per-click marketing landscape. We pulled these PPC statistics from trusted sources and double-checked their freshness to guarantee their credibility.

Now, it’s time to drink from the fire hose. Let’s dive into these PPC statistics!

PPC Statistics List

1. Companies spent $106.5 billion on search advertising in 2019. (Statista)
2. Google’s ad platform reaches more than 2 million websites and apps. (SERP Watch)
3. 1.2 million businesses and 1 million websites are pare of the Google Search Network and Ad Display Network. (SERP Watch)
4. Google owns roughly 93% of the search engine market including both paid and organic search. (SERP Watch)
5. Paid search ads can improve brand awareness by 80% (Google)
6. PPC is one of the top 3 sources of on page conversions. (Form Stack)
7. 17% of marketers use PPC ads for lead generation. (Formstack)
8. 45% of small businesses invest in PPC advertising. (Clutch)
9. 78% of marketers say that they rely on Google Ads and social media ads to get their message out. (Formstack)
10. Paid ads have an 11.38% CTR on Google (Sparktoro)
11. 41% of paid clicks go to the top 3 ads on the search results page. (WordStream)
12. Paid ads get 65% of all clicks for searches from buyers looking to purchase a product. (WordStream)
13. The top paid ad has an average CTR of 7.94% while the average CTR is 2%. (AccuraCast)
14. The legal industry has the highest average cost per action at roughly $135 per action. (Search Engine Land)
15. The highest average CPC ($6.75) for Google Ads belongs to the legal industry. (Statista)
16. The lowest average CPC ($1.16) for Google Ads belongs to the eCommerce industry. (Statista)
17. The industries spending the most on PPC marketing in 2018 were retail, education, publishing, and travel. (Social Media Today)
18. The industries spending the least on PPC marketing in 2018 were home improvement, consumables, and automotive. (Social Media Today)
19. Bing’s average CPC is $1.54 which is ~33% lower than Google Ads (WordStream)
20. 64% of brands are planning to increase their PPC budget in the next 12 months. (Social Media Today)
21. 40% of brands say that their PPC budget is lower than where they want it to be. (Social Media Today)
22. Paid search makes up 39% of advertisers’ budgets on average. (Search Engine Land)
23. Search advertising is expected to reach $132 billion by 2022. (Statista)
24. 80% of marketers dedicate a portion of their ad budget to search, social, display, and re-marketing ad campaigns. (Social Media Today)
25. Google and Facebook have the largest share of digital ad spending with 38.6% and 19.9% respectively. (WordStream)
26. On average, SMBs that use Google Ads spend $9,000 – $10,000 per month in ad spend. (WordStream)
27. 65% of small to mid sized businesses have active PPC campaigns. (Clutch)
28. Only 10% of Google Ads accounts are optimized once a week. (WordStream)
29. 20% of Google Ads account managers do nothing on their accounts within a single month. (WordStream)
30. 72% of companies haven’t looked at their ad campaigns in over a month.
31. 16% of searches for clothing items reference a gender-related term, i.e. “men’s shirt”s, “women’s shorts”, etc. (Google)
32. 45% of “dress” searches contain a reference to an event like a wedding or graduation. (Google)
33. 1 in 8 searches for bottoms (trousers, shorts, skirts, etc.) reference a color with black being the most popular. (Google)
34. Text ads are the most popular type of PPC ad with 49% of users clicking on them. (Search Engine Land)
35. 77% of users are confident they can recognize paid search ads. (Clutch)
36. 36% of users can’t readily tell the difference between PPC ads and organic results if there isn’t a right column. (HubSpot)
37. 75% of people say that paid ads make it easier to find what they’re looking for (Mar Tech Series)
38. People are 4x as likely to click a paid search ad on Google (63%) than any other search engine – Amazon (15%), YouTube (9%), and Bing (5%) (Clutch)
39. 41% of shoppers are comfortable with online retailers monitoring their shopping patterns to personalize offers. (PWC)
40. People are 27x more likely to click on a video ad than standard banner ads. (CMO)
41. 49% of people said they click on text ads, 31% on shopping ads, and 16% on video ads. (Search Engine Land)
42. PPC visitors are 50% more likely to buy something than organic visitors. (Unbounce)
43. Companies spent $161 billion on display advertising in 2019. (Statista)
44. It’s expected that 85% of total display ad spend in 2020 will be in programmatic advertising. (eMarketer)
45. Display advertising has been proven to increase traffic to websites by 300%. (Visua.ly)
46. Consumers exposed to display ads are 155% more likely to search for brand-specific terms at a later date. (SERP Watch)
47. The average CPC in Google Ads is $2.69 on the search network and $0.63 on the display network. (WordStream)
48. The average CTR in Google Ads is 3.17% on the search network and 0.46% on the display network. (WordStream)
49. The highest CPC for Google display ads is $1.49 for dating and personals ads. (Statista)
50. The lowest CPC for Google display ads is $0.44 for travel and hospitality ads. (Statista)
51. 16% of advertiser’s budgets went towards display advertising. (Search Engine Journal)
52. The number of users that use ad blockers on desktops and laptops is 38%, 25% on smartphones, and 15% on tablets. (Social Media Today)
53. The top 5 reasons for ad block adoption is too many ads (49%), annoying / irrelevant ads (47%), too intrusive (44%), ads contain viruses or bugs (38%), and ads take up too much screen space (38%). (Social Media Today)
54. Use of ad blockers in the US has increased from 15% in 2014 to 26% in 2019. (Statista)
55. Ad Blocker adoption exploded by nearly 9x from 21 million devices in 2010 to 181 million devices in 2015. (WordStream)
56. Ad blockers could cost publishers close to $35 billion by the end of 2020. (Digiday)
57. Nearly 45% of 18 – 24 year olds use some sort of ad blocking software. (Digiday)
58. Social and mobile gaming video ads have a 91% viewing completion rate. (CMO)
59. Search advertising on mobile is expected to reach $146B by 2023. (Statista)
60. 50% of paid search clicks come from mobile (WordStream)
61. 70% of all paid search impressions are on mobile (Mobile Marketer)
62. Marketers and advertisers are putting 54% of their budget into mobile ads. (Mobile Marketer)
63. Local Services Ads by Google receive 13.8% of local SERP clicks (BrightLocal)
64. 59% of shoppers use Google to research a product before buying it in-store or online. (Google)
65. Customers that click on a PPC ad before going to a store are 27% more likely to purchase something in-store. (Google)
66. “Near me” mobile searches with “can i buy” or “to buy” have increased by 500% over the last 2 years. (Google)
67. 37% of users look at social networks as being the most influential factor when finding or shopping for products. (PWC)
68. 18% of advertisers’ budget is dedicated to social media. (Search Engine Journal)
69. 32% of marketers say that video is the most effective format for social ads followed by image ads (26%), Instagram Stories (23%), and carousel ads (19%). (Search Engine Journal)
70. Facebook generated $21 billion in ad revenue during 2018 in the US. (Social Media Today)
71. 87% of Facebook’s advertising revenue comes from mobile devices. (AdWeek)
72. 24% of Instagram users (age 16 & up) prefer video ads the most. (Statista)
73. 37% of Instagram users report that the content shown in sponsored ads accurately matches their interests. (Statista)
74. 28% of Instagram users click the “more” link to get more info on 10% of the ads they see. (Statista)
75. 25% of users that have hidden ads on Instagram do so because they are annoyed by sponsored ads. (Statista)
76. 9% of Instagram users reportedly say that they’ve never hidden an ad before. (Statista)
77. 48% of users in the US have used Pinterest to find or shop for products. (eMarketer)
78. 65% of B2B companies have acquired a customer through LinkedIn paid ads. (HubSpot)
79. There are 2 billion unique monthly users on YouTube. (Variety)
80. 81% of internet users in the US between the ages of 15 – 25 use YouTube. (Statista)
81. YouTube ads leads to a 20% traffic increase for websites using them. (Contently)
82. 43% of new customers buy something they saw in a YouTube Ad. (Contently)
83. 84% of marketers that use paid search are using or will use Google’s new responsive search ads. (Search Engine Journal)
84. Google is the most trusted publisher among advertisers with a 98% trust index rating. (Search Engine Journal)
85. YouTube is the third most popular paid social platform with 48% of marketers investing in it. (PPC Hero)
86. 78% of marketers believe that YouTube is the most popular video marketing platform followed by Facebook at 58%. (Business2Community)
87. Skipped video ads do not count as views and advertisers don’t have to pay for skipped ads. (Medium)
88. Amazon is the third most popular advertising platform. (Media Post)
89. Sponsored product ads on Amazon have the highest sales per click on their platform. (Media Post)
90. Amazon sponsored products and sponsored brand ads convert at more than 3x the rate of Google Shopping ad clicks. (Media Post)
91. Amazon earned $10 billion in digital ad revenue in the US alone during 2019. (eMarketer)
92. $2.76 billion was spent on Amazon display ads in the US in 2019. (eMarketer)
93. $7.09 billion was spent on Amazon search ads in the US in 2019. (eMarketer)
94. $0.71 is the average CPC on Amazon’s ad platform. (Ad Badger)
95. 85% of ad spend on Amazon is for sponsored products. (eMarketer)
96. Amazon holds 13% of total search ad revenue share in the US. (eMarketer)
97. 33% of people click on a YouTube / Amazon ad because it mentions a brand they are familiar with. (Clutch)

PPC Stat Breakdown: What you should takeaway from these stats

You drank from the fire hose, now it’s time to understand what all of these numbers and jargon mean at the granular level and how they fit into the greater picture of growing your business through paid marketing.

1. General PPC statistics

These pay-per-click stats cover the overall paid marketing landscape, campaign performance benchmarks, and PPC adoption/usage rates by existing companies. This section will give you a top-down view of what you can hope to see if you invest in PPC marketing.

Companies spent $106.5 billion on search advertising in 2019.

Pay per click is a multi-billion dollar industry that keeps growing every year. This tells us that A) current advertisers are devoting more of their budget to PPC every year, and B) more advertisers are adding PPC to their online marketing efforts.

Google’s ad platform reaches more than 2 million websites and apps.

There’s more to Google than just Google.com. Their ad network reaches across millions of websites so your ads have a significantly higher reach and target significantly more customers than they would have otherwise.

1.2 million businesses and 1 million websites are part of the Google Search and Ad Display Network.

This is a toggle-able setting that gives you the option to show your ads on Google’s ad networks. They will only show your ads when they are predicted to be effective so they aren’t just randomly shown to just anyone.

Showing your ads on these networks can lower your CPCs & CPAs while drastically expanding your brand awareness.

Google owns roughly 93% of the search engine market including both paid and organic search.

Google is the big dog in the paid ad space. If you’re planning on investing in paid marketing campaigns, Google had better be at the top of your shortlist for PPC platforms or you’re going to miss out on a ton of potential new customers.

Paid search ads can improve brand awareness by 80%.

Brand awareness can be just as, if not more, important as generating a lead or getting a sale. You always want to be on your customers’ minds so when the time comes for them to buy, they’ll think of you first.

A Google Ads Re-Marketing Campaign or Facebook Brand Awareness campaign are two excellent ways to maintain a healthy brand presence online.

PPC is one of the top 3 sources of on page conversions.

It should come as no surprise that sending highly targeted traffic to a highly optimized landing page is one of the best ways to generate conversions for your business. This PPC statistic is a good reminder that if paid marketing isn’t one of the top 3 sources for your conversions, you should dig into what’s holding it back.

17% of marketers use PPC ads for lead generation.

PPC is a great way to send highly targeted to your lead generation landing pages. It’s especially useful if you’ve started a new company, you lack inbound traffic, or you’re testing out a new product or new audience.

45% of small businesses invest in PPC advertising.

Nearly 1 out of every 2 SMBs is investing in PPC advertising. Most of the time, these campaigns are done in limited runs with a small budget to collect information about keywords and test the waters before fully investing in a long-term campaign.

78% of marketers say that they rely on Google Ads and social media ads to get their message out.

Paid marketing is probably the most valuable tool to put your company in front of new potential customers. By investing in both Google Ads and Social Media Ads, you’re able to land the 1-2 punch of intent marketing and disruption marketing to broaden the reach of your message.

Paid ads have an 11.38% CTR on Google.

The general benchmark for visitors clicking through to a landing page for a paid search is roughly 11%. This means that you should expect 11% of however many clicks you end up buying to actually hit your landing page.

Knowing how many visitors could click through to your site, along with some other figures, will help you estimate your campaign’s potential ROI.

Bear in mind, this does depend on optimizing your ads. You can’t just turn on a Google ads campaign and expect 11% CTR straight out of the box. The image above is from a Google Ads that we’ve been managing for one of our clients over the last 3 years.

It didn’t start at 15%. We had to work our way there through iteration and AB testing. The same goes for the conversion rate too.

41% of paid clicks go to the top 3 ads on the search results page.

Ad placement is one of the main drivers for how many clicks your ads will get. This isn’t a secret. Your competitors know about it and will be actively competing with you to take those coveted spots and maximize their own visibility.

Keep an eye on your search impression share and search lost impression share due to rank. These figures will tell you how many impressions you got vs how many you could have gotten and how often your ad wasn’t seen because of its rank.

In a perfect world, your impression share would be 100%, and lost to rank would be 0%, but not everyone has the budget to make that happen.

Paid ads get 65% of all clicks for searches from buyers looking to purchase a product.

Google has top-loaded its search results pages with text ads, shopping ads, carousels, etc. to put both products and businesses that sell those products in front of people looking for them.

The top paid ad has an average CTR of 7.94% while the average CTR is 2%.

If you properly optimize your campaign and ad copy so you’re able to take the top ad spot, you can expect a click-through rate (CTR) of around 8%. Now, this isn’t the maximum CTR you can get, but it is the average.

This figure serves as a good benchmark to judge your own campaigns by. If your ads are in the top spot, but you’re not getting an ~8% CTR, you need to spend some time aligning your keywords with your ad copy to boost performance.

The legal industry has the highest average cost per action at roughly $135 per action.

Another good benchmark is the legal industry’s average CPA of $135. Lawyers have deep pockets for their marketing budgets and they’re willing to shell out some serious money to get leads.

If you aren’t in the legal industry and your CPA is in the $135 range (or higher), you probably need to analyze your whole paid marketing funnel to smooth out any conversion barriers.

The highest average CPC ($6.75) for Google Ads belongs to the legal industry.

CPC, or cost per click, is how much you have to pay each time someone clicks on your ads. CPCs vary from keyword to keyword, industry to industry, and ad type to ad type with the legal industry being the most expensive on average.

When planning out your campaign, be sure to keep tracking of your average CPC to project how much traffic you can get on your budget.

The lowest average CPC ($1.16) for Google Ads belongs to the eCommerce industry.

Paid traffic is the cheapest to get for eCommerce websites. This gives you an amazing opportunity to experiment with PPC campaigns as well as test new products on your website without making a major dent in your budget.

You can even drive your CPC down further by spinning up a display ad campaign or a remarketing ad campaign. CPCs for these campaigns can be as low as $0.10 per click.

The industries spending the most on PPC marketing in 2018 were retail, education, publishing, and travel.

These are not the most expensive industries, they are the most competitive. They’re outspending every other industry because there are so many businesses investing in PPC.

That means that if you’re going to throw your hat in the ring, you are either going to have to A) outspend the competition, B) outsmart them, or C) outwork them.

The industries spending the least on PPC marketing in 2018 were home improvement, consumables, and automotive.

These industries are hyper-local and both proximity and word-of-mouth vastly outweigh any sort of marketing they could do. For example, the only business that’s spending money on ads for “grocery stores near me” is Amazon.

Not Kroger, not Tom Thumb, not Sprouts, not Walmart, just Amazon.

The reason for this is quite simple.

Once these types of businesses get a customer they typically have them for life. I’ve personally been shopping at Kroger and Home Depot for 15+ years mainly because that’s where my parents shopped when I was a kid and I (generally) know where everything is in their stores.

Their competitors would need to spend a ton of effort and money to break that sort of brand loyalty.

Bing’s average CPC is $1.54 which is ~33% lower than Google Ads

Bing is often overlooked by many businesses as a source of traffic and leads/sales. It’s probably because Google takes up ~71% of search share for the entire Internet while Bing is at ~13%.

However, if you’re wanting to take PPC marketing for a test drive and you’re on a tight budget, Bing Ads can be a cheaper alternative to Google Ads.

2. PPC Budget Stats

One of the first questions we always get asked about PPC by our clients is, “How much should we spend?” These pay-per-click marketing stats show you what other businesses are spending, how much of their total online marketing budget they dedicate to PPC, and what they plan on doing moving forward.

Paid search makes up 39% of advertisers’ budgets on average.

Paid search is still an incredibly popular and effective advertising channel. This is primarily because:

• Highly customizable traffic targeting to put your ads in front of your target audience.
• Advertisers can curate how potential customers interact with their website for a curated experience.
• Iterative AB testing in a controlled environment so you can keep what works and discard what doesn’t.
• Easier to calculate your ROI than other forms of digital marketing.

40% of brands say that their PPC budget is lower than where they want it to be.

It’s a pretty standard practice that marketing teams are tasked with making more out of less. That often leaves us with finding unique ways to spread a company’s message and spending far less than we would like on paid marketing.

It’s a common enough practice that nearly half of all brands are spending less on PPC than they would like to be.

64% of brands are planning to increase their PPC budget in the next 12 months.

More than half of all businesses are seeing enough success in their PPC efforts that they want to increase spending over the next year.

One thing to bear in mind here is that these brands are already investing in PPC which means that they’re probably already seeing success from their campaigns. Therefore, by increasing their PPC budget they will likely see a proportionate increase in their revenue.

Search advertising is expected to reach $132 billion by 2022.

The amount that U.S. advertisers spend on search marketing has been steadily increasing every year since 2009. It’s even projected to break $132 billion by 2022, but the current trend will see that figure met sooner rather than later.

This spending is also more than China, the UK, Japan, and Germany spent in 2018 combined.

80% of marketers dedicate a portion of their ad budget to search, social, display, and re-marketing ad campaigns.

It helps to know where other companies are putting their budget when planning out your marketing strategy. You can narrow your focus to just those specific areas and prioritize them based on what value they’d bring to your business.

And there’s the added benefit that you can spend more time fleshing out your strategy instead of wasting time doing research on something you probably won’t end up doing.

Google and Facebook have the largest share of digital ad spending with 38.6% and 19.9% respectively.

There are billions of daily active users on Google & Facebook and at the end of the day, PPC marketing is a numbers game. Go to where the people are. Cast as wide of a net as your budget will allow.

Google and Facebook are two of the biggest fish in the pond so your paid marketing strategy needs to include them.

On average, SMBs that use Google Ads spend $9,000 – $10,000 per month in ad spend.

While not every small business has $10k just lying around to throw at Google Ads, you do want to spend as much as you’re able to. The more clicks you buy, the more opportunities you give yourself to earn new customers.

We normally recommend that our new PPC clients set their ad budget between $3,000 – $5,000 to get started. This lets us bring in enough traffic to produce good, clean data that gives us the insight we need to optimize their campaigns before really opening the flood gates.

However, you shouldn’t focus on ad spend. Focus on generating ROI instead.

If you can earn $2 for every $1 you spend, your ad budget is however much revenue you want to generate.

Want to make an extra million this year? Dog ear half a million for your PPC budget and you’ll hit it.

3. PPC Management Stats

I’m doing this batch of takeaways in reverse for a reason that should already be fairly, if not blatantly, apparent to you.

• 65% of small to mid sized businesses have active PPC campaigns.
• < 10% of Google Ads accounts are being optimized every week.
• 20% of Google Ads account managers do nothing on their accounts within a single month.
• 72% of companies haven’t looked at their ad campaigns in over a month.

Businesses are flat-out neglecting their Google Ads accounts.

Almost 90% of accounts aren’t being optimized weekly, 20% don’t even touch their account on a monthly basis, and 72% have no idea how their campaigns are performing.

That is complete and utter insanity and the primary reason why most PPC campaigns don’t convert!

The higher your budget the more often you need to check on your campaigns. If you just let them run on auto-pilot you could, quite literally, be wasting thousands of dollars of ad spend.

The bottom line is that you should be touching every single PPC campaign once a week. Even if it’s just a surface-level KPI pulse check to see how things are going.

If you’re one of those companies that doesn’t have a good handle on your PPC management, drop me a line. Seriously. You need to let me manage your pay-per-click ASAP.

4. User Engagement Stats

Many businesses and advertisers don’t take the time to factor user behavior into their PPC campaigns. Understanding how users go about finding what they’re looking for will help you capitalize on their behavior and result in a higher ROI.

16% of searches for clothing items reference a gender-related term, i.e. “men’s shirts”, “women’s shorts”, etc.

16% may not sound like a lot, but this is the type of user you want to target.

Searchers that use longer tail keywords, like “men’s blue exercise shirts”, are further along in the buying process than searchers that use short-tail keywords, like “shirts”. The former has already done their research and has now narrowed their criteria from “shirts” to “men’s blue exercise shirts”.

They have their target, now they want to buy it.

45% of “dress” searches contain a reference to an event like a wedding or graduation.

Keyword targeting and relevance are incredibly important when it comes to PPC. For instance, if someone is looking for a Prom dress and you show them an ad or send them to a page for sundresses instead, you’re not fulfilling their needs.

This disconnect will cause friction and that friction leads to a lost opportunity.

Segmenting your campaigns into silos that focus on specific groups of products like Prom dresses, sundresses, wedding dresses, etc. will ensure a positive user experience with your brand.

1 in 8 searches for bottoms (trousers, shorts, skirts, etc.) reference a color with black being the most popular.

Adding attributes to your keywords is an excellent way to improve your targeting.

Using the above example, let’s say you run a retail shop and you have a “pants” campaign in Google Ads. It is definitely worth your time to create ad groups for individual types and/or colors of pants to improve your targeting.

Text ads are the most popular type of PPC ad with 49% of users clicking on them.

Let’s be honest. The search results page is a cluttered mess. It can make finding an answer to your search query a bit difficult.

The image below is the full search results page for “exercise shirts for men” and out of everything Google served up for that query, there are only 5 search results that lead to ecommerce pages. The rest are either paid ads, product ads, articles, local map listings, knowledge graph answers, or related searches.

That’s cluttered.

So, the primary reason why 49% of searchers click on text ads is that the ads answered their query.

Why go digging through all that clutter when you can just click on one of the top ads that looks like it has what you’re looking for?

77% of users are confident they can recognize paid search ads.

This may just be restricted to Google text ads since paid ad placement and notation varies from platform to platform.

36% of users can’t readily tell the difference between PPC ads and organic results if there isn’t a right column.

Perhaps they’re a little too confident.

Every instance of a paid ad on the Google platform is marked as being either “paid” or “sponsored”.

75% of people say that paid ads make it easier to find what they’re looking for.

When your text ad copy is connected to a searcher’s query, they’re more likely to click on your ad and this saves them the trouble of digging through the rest of the search results.

People are 4x as likely to click a paid search ad on Google (63%) than any other search engine – Amazon (15%), YouTube (9%), and Bing (5%).

Though there isn’t hard data for this, I believe this boils down to trust, experience, and the platform’s overall user base.

• Everyone uses Google. They’ve clicked on ads before that have solved their queries.
• Amazon has a problem with scammers and fake sellers that needs to be solved.
• YouTube displays disruption ads instead intent based ads.
• Bing just has a small user base, comparatively. (Google has 71% of organic search share while Bing has 13%.)

Bear in mind that this won’t have an effect on your CTRs on those platforms. For instance, we consistently get high single and low double-digit CTRs for our Bing Ads campaigns.

41% of shoppers are comfortable with online retailers monitoring their shopping patterns to personalize offers.

On top of that, they expect retailers to stay up to date with their browsing habits to show them the most relevant products in their ads. That includes their behavior in-store, social media, and online to create individualized ads unique to their experiences.

People are 27x more likely to click on a video ad than standard banner ads.

The average user sees tens of thousands of ads every month. Standard banner ads have been around since the late 90s. They are so common that many users just glide right past them. Videos catch your eye, are jam-packed with more info, and they just do a better job of selling your product than a flat image ever could.

49% of people said they click on text ads, 31% on shopping ads, and 16% on video ads.

Different PPC campaigns target users at different stages of the buying process.

For instance, someone clicking on a paid shopping ad is in the later stages of the shopping funnel whereas someone clicking on a text ad might still be in the discovery or research stages. These users have different goals and need to be marketed to differently.

Understanding how users will interact with your ad based on the type of campaign you’re running will help improve your targeting and help them on their journey through the buying process.

PPC visitors are 50% more likely to buy something than organic visitors.

Users that click on pay-per-click ads are, typically, ready to convert. They know what they want, now it’s time to find it. With paid search ads located at the top of the search results page, they’re the first thing users see and will click on.

Most campaigns are meant to sell a product, service, or some kind of good. Of course, they’re more likely to buy! That’s the point!

5. Display Ad PPC statistics

Display ads are an excellent tool to raise brand awareness, re-market to visitors that left your site without converting, and stay on your audience’s mind while they’re elsewhere on the internet. These PPC ad statistics are meant to show how powerful these affordable ads can be.

Companies spent $161 billion on display advertising in 2019.

Advertisers in the U.S. spent more on paid display ads than advertisers in China, the UK, Japan, and Germany combined and the retail industry was 22% of that ad spend.

It’s expected that 85% of total display ad spend in 2020 will be in programmatic advertising.

Automation has proven to be an invaluable tool for marketers to generate revenue. There are a number of services that help you show the right user the right ad at the right time with little to zero input on your end. These services are incredibly modular and scalable which has led to their incredible adoption rate.

Display advertising has been proven to increase traffic to websites by 300%.

Display advertising is the best way to build brand awareness. It needs to be a part of every single paid search strategy regardless of what your company does or what its value proposition is. If your target audience doesn’t know about you, they can’t do business with you.

For instance, one of our clients made the decision to turn off their branded display campaign on Facebook. The change can be seen in the image below.

This was the only change that could have affected their branded organic traffic and it led to a 48% decrease in branded organic clicks and a 37% loss of branded organic impressions.

Consumers exposed to display ads are 155% more likely to search for brand-specific terms at a later date.

Display ads are an excellent tool to control a potential customer’s first touchpoint with your brand. This introduction lets them know who you are and, depending on your ad creative, what you do so they know how to find you if and when they need you.

Average benchmarks help you create projections and forecasts for your own paid search campaigns.

• The average CPC in Google Ads is $2.69 on the search network and $0.63 on the display network.
• The average CTR in Google Ads is 3.17% on the search network and 0.46% on the display network.
• The highest CPC for Google display ads is $1.49 for dating and personals ads.
• The lowest CPC for Google display ads is $0.44 for travel and hospitality ads.

16% of advertiser’s budgets went towards display advertising.

Advertisers have dedicated a substantial portion of their marketing budgets towards display ads. Yours may be higher or lower depending on your paid search strategy, but this is a good benchmark to keep in mind when planning out your annual budget.

6. Ad Block Stats

We can’t talk about display ads without at least touching on the 900 lbs. gorilla in the room that is ad block, which is a simple software that prevents ads from being shown. These PPC marketing stats cover ad block adoption, usage, trends, and projections.

The number of users that use ad blockers on desktops and laptops is 38%, 25% on smartphones, and 15% on tablets.

Desktops have the largest number of users that use ad blockers. This is mainly because it’s the easiest device to reliably use ad-blocking software on. If visibility is a key concern of yours, you may want to restrict your ads to only show on smartphones and tablets.

The top 5 reasons for ad block adoption is too many ads (49%), annoying / irrelevant ads (47%), too intrusive (44%), ads contain viruses or bugs (38%), and ads take up too much screen space (38%).

Bottom line, bad actors, crappy advertisers, and greedy publishers are the primary drivers for ad block adoption. Their self-sabotaging behavior has driven people to use this software to drown out all the noise they’ve created which, in turn, hurts their revenue generation.

Use of ad blockers in the US has increased from 15% in 2014 to 26% in 2019.

Usage increased by 42% in a five-year time frame. That is incredible growth. And we’re seeing countries like Germany outpacing America with 32% usage.

Ad blocker adoption exploded by nearly 9x from 21 million devices in 2010 to 181 million devices in 2015.

As the software becomes more commonplace and easier to use, you can expect the adoption rate to increase proportionately meaning fewer and fewer people will be seeing ads in the future.

Ad blockers could cost publishers close to $35 billion by the end of 2020.

This stat could be misconstrued. To clarify, advertisers are not going to lose $35B, they are simply not going to make $35B because ad block prevents their ads from being seen. That figure is lost potential revenue, not lost capital.

Nearly 45% of 18 – 24 year olds use some sort of ad blocking software.

Naturally, younger generations take to newer technology faster than their predecessors. This can prove problematic if you’re marketing a business that has them as your target demographic. You can expect to see lower than average engagement metrics from your display advertising campaigns because of their ad-block usage.

7. Mobile PPC Statistics

The question isn’t “Is mobile a thing?” it’s “How big will mobile get?” These stats will help you understand how important it is to not sleep on building mobile-specific paid ad campaigns to grow your business.

Social and mobile gaming video ads have a 91% viewing completion rate.

Users have an unbelievably high completion rate for watching video ads on mobile. Restricting your ads to just these devices could help boost your watch rates so your potential customers are able to learn more about your business.

Search advertising on mobile is expected to reach $146B by 2023.

Mobile devices are quickly becoming most users’ primary device for browsing and shopping online. Advertisers know this and are dedicating substantial portions of their budgets to reach users on their preferred device.

50% of paid search clicks come from mobile.

Mobile traffic surpassed desktop traffic during 2016 so it should come as no surprise that paid clicks have followed suit. Google has also switched to a mobile-first site indexing model so the trend will continue as the industry pulls marketers, and users, in that direction.

70% of all paid search impressions are on mobile.

This is in spite of mobile devices having fewer ads per page compared to the same searches on desktop. This data tells us that there are significantly more users on mobile devices, which is why…

Marketers and advertisers are putting 54% of their budget into mobile ads.

We go where the customers are and the customers are on mobile. Expect to see mobile ad budgets scale in step with mobile device usage.

8. Local PPC Statistics

Local businesses live and die by the amount of foot traffic that comes through their doors. If you just opened a brick-and-mortar shop, you’ll need to invest in local PPC and these local paid ad statistics will help you get started.

Local Services Ads by Google receive 13.8% of local SERP clicks.

The LSAs are a relatively new addition to the search results page that are shown above paid text ads. These ads are typically shown for local trade businesses (locksmiths, plumbers, electricians, etc.) and a great way to get brand exposure and secure leads.

Their ~14% CTR is is 76% higher than the average CTR of the top paid ad (7.94%). If you’re in a competitive space (like local trades), these ads present an excellent opportunity for you to drum up new business if you have the budget to spare.

59% of shoppers use Google to research a product before buying it in-store or online.

Shoppers are savvier than ever. They are going to do their research to make sure they get the right product at the best price available. Make sure that your:

• Products are easy to find.
• Value proposition is clear and easy to understand.
• Prices are competitive. (They don’t have to be the lowest.)

“Near me” mobile searches with “can i buy” or “to buy” have increased by 500% over the last 2 years.

Google has helped increase the visibility of local businesses by releasing multiple algorithm updates over the last 5 years. This coupled with GPS location services has drastically increased the quality of local search and users have responded with rapid adoption and continued daily use.

Customers that click on a PPC ad before going to a store are 27% more likely to purchase something in-store.

Most local searches (both organic and paid) are to find a product that’s near the searcher and to make sure it’s in stock. Making this information quickly available to your potential customers can increase the odds that it’s your store they visit in person.

9. Social PPC Statistics

Billions of people log into social media every day. It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in, your target audience is out there waiting for you to turn them into customers. These paid social ad stats will shed some light on how to better target potential customers on social media.

37% of users look at social networks as being the most influential factor when finding or shopping for products.

Social proof has become the new word-of-mouth. Your potential customers take recommendations from people in their circles seriously and will trust what they say. Your reviews on social media and the conversation around your brand can have a profound effect on growing your business.

18% of advertisers’ budget is dedicated to social media.

This is the second-largest share of ad budgets (behind paid search) and it’s mainly due to many brands expanding their social advertising to include new platforms. They aren’t sacrificing their Facebook budget to advertise on Twitch or Reddit. They’re adding more platforms to their deck.

32% of marketers say that video is the most effective format for social ads followed by image ads (26%), Instagram Stories (23%), and carousel ads (19%).

Knowing how well an ad type should be performing will help you understand the effectiveness of your own ad. This knowledge will also give you the insight to spin up the right type of ad for your campaign’s goals.

Facebook generated $21 billion in ad revenue during 2018 in the US.

This is more than double the amount spent on newspaper advertising and close to the total amount spent on print ads, and it’s just on Facebook ads.

87% of Facebook’s advertising revenue comes from mobile devices.

Even with 21% of Facebook’s monthly active users only using mobile devices, mobile still accounts for basically all of their advertising revenue. It might be worth your while to experiment with mobile-only campaigns to test how it affects your return on ad spend (ROAS).

24% of Instagram users (age 16 & up) prefer video ads the most.

The best way to ensure engagement with your ads is to use your audience’s preferred ad type. If they like video ads, use video ads. If they like image ads, use image ads.

37% of Instagram users report that the content shown in sponsored ads accurately matches their interests.

Personal opinion, this is incredibly low. This tells us that users are being shown irrelevant ads far more often than they are relevant ones, which goes to show that advertisers are targeting the wrong people. If your ads aren’t performing well, it’s probably because your targeting is off.

25% of users that have hidden ads on Instagram do so because they are annoyed by sponsored ads.

Showing the wrong ads to the wrong people will prompt users to hide them. Depending on the platform, this can have a negative effect on your account causing it to have longer ad approval times, be suspended, or be shut down.

9% of Instagram users reportedly say that they’ve never hidden an ad before.

These people must be the most tolerant and easy-going people on the planet…or they’re dirty, filthy liars.

However, when ad targeting is on point, they can seamlessly blend into a user’s feed.

28% of Instagram users click the “more” link to get more info on 10% of the ads they see.

Adding a “Learn more” or “shop now” button on your Facebook and Instagram ads can increase their click-through rates so more users enter your funnel.

48% of users in the US have used Pinterest to find or shop for products.

Pinterest is a great site to find ideas for…basically anything. Fitness, interior design, nutrition, fashion, you name it there’s a board for it. This makes it incredibly easy to find new products centered around your interests and give them a go.

65% of B2B companies have acquired a customer through LinkedIn paid ads.

LinkedIn has been changing over the years, but it’s still the primary social network for business professionals. Being active on LinkedIn is a great way to network and make new contacts that can become new customers with the right messaging and outreach.

10. YouTube Ad Statistics

Video marketing is one of the most powerful ways to establish your brand presence online. These stats will help you understand just how big of an opportunity advertising on YouTube is and why you should have started it yesterday!

There are 2 billion unique monthly users on YouTube.

YouTube is, quite literally, the second largest search engine on the internet and it’s one of the major sources of entertainment for 15 – 35 year olds.

81% of internet users in the US between the ages of 15 – 25 use YouTube.

The platform does skew towards a younger audience. However, there are videos and channels for people of all ages and interests. This gives advertisers an amazing opportunity to find, and target, their ideal customers.

YouTube ads leads to a 20% traffic increase for websites using them.

Similar to display ads, YouTube ads are an excellent way to boost your brand awareness and bring more visitors to your website.

43% of new customers buy something they saw in a YouTube Ad.

YouTube ads are a great way to separate wheat from the chaff. People that aren’t interested in your products will skip your ad, but those that are interested are more likely to stick around and engage with your business.

The beautiful thing about ads on YouTube is that you only have to pay for them if a user watches more than 30 seconds of your ad. So, you never have to pay a cent for people that skip your ad.

84% of marketers that use paid search are using or will use Google’s new responsive search ads.

This new ad type basically has built-in split testing, which is why it’s become so popular so quickly. You’re able to create multiple headlines, multiple descriptions, and Google will show the most relevant combinations to users. This, typically, leads to higher CTRs and conversion rates.

For instance, we tested this for one of our clients, and responsive ads consistently led to better performance to where we exclusively use them now.

That said, you will have to do testing and make sure that your different headlines, descriptions, etc. all make sense across all the different permutations.

Google is the most trusted publisher among advertisers with a 98% trust index rating.

Google has one of the oldest ad platforms and they’ve certainly been doing the best job for the longest amount of time. Because you’re advertising on their platform, this inherent trust is extended to your ads.

78% of marketers believe that YouTube is the most popular video marketing platform followed by Facebook at 58%.

YouTube and Facebook are the main players in the video marketing space. They have significantly higher user bases and more robust advertising platforms than other sites. If you’re planning on investing in video marketing, get on one or both of these platforms.

However, bear in mind that Facebook has lied about video views in the past.

Skipped video ads do not count as views and advertisers don’t have to pay for skipped ads.

As we mentioned earlier, advertisers are not on the hook to pay for ads when a user skips their ad or watches less than 30 seconds of it. That means you’re reaching your audience and getting brand exposure for free.

YouTube is the third most popular paid social platform with 48% of marketers investing in it.

Advertisers have caught on to the immense opportunity to use YouTube to grow their businesses and are investing heavily in the platform.

11. Amazon PPC Statistics

Amazon’s ad platform is definitely the new kid on the block, but they aren’t pulling their punches. They’ve only been active for a few years now, but they’re already a multi-billion dollar revenue stream. These PPC statistics will help you understand just how big their platform is and how much you have to gain from dipping your toes in their pond.

Amazon is the third most popular advertising platform.

Even though it’s only a few years old, Amazon has already taken third just behind Google / YouTube and Facebook / Instagram. Given Amazon’s popularity and huge user base, it won’t be long before it takes the #2 spot.

Sponsored product ads on Amazon have the highest sales per click on their platform.

Visibility is the name of the game on Amazon. Most shoppers will buy the first product that shows up for their search on their platform. Sponsored product ads push products above the “organic” results so you’re in the top spots.

Amazon sponsored products and sponsored brand ads convert at more than 3x the rate of Google Shopping ad clicks.

Amazon searchers are on an ecommerce website and ready to buy. Users searching on Google may still be in the research or comparison phases of the buying funnel.

Amazon earned $10 billion in digital ad revenue in the US alone during 2019.

Advertisers are flocking to Amazon and spending a ton of money on ads. They’re also projected to hit $16 billion by 2021 if their current performance holds.

$2.76 billion was spent on Amazon display ads in the US in 2019.

This is up from $1.93 billion in 2018 and is projected to hit $5.01 billion in 2021.

$7.09 billion was spent on Amazon search ads in the US in 2019.

This is up from $5.48 billion in 2018 and is projected to hit $11 billion in 2021.

$0.71 is the average CPC on Amazon’s ad platform.

71 cents a click on a platform as big as Amazon’s is a friggin steal. Granted, this is the average CPC so your CPCs may not be the same, but that is low compared to Google. Couple that with have 3x conversion rate of Google Ads and there’s a lot of potential to have a high ROAS.

85% of ad spend on Amazon is for sponsored products.

Sponsored products are the best-paid ad type on Amazon. You can have success with sponsored brands, display ads, and so on, but they don’t hold a candle to the ROAS you can achieve with sponsored products, which is why it holds the lion’s share of ad spend.

Amazon holds 13% of total search ad revenue share in the US.

Google is still at the top of the mountain with ~73% paid ad revenue share, but Amazon is up to 13% in 2019 from 6.5% in 2017. They doubled their share in just 2 years and will hit 16% in 2021.

33% of people click on a YouTube / Amazon ad because it mentions a brand they are familiar with.

Familiarity is one of the primary ways to build trust in a new customer. If they don’t know who you are, they can still be familiar with the products you carry. That association can help project some of that trust onto your brand and help get that first click.

Recap

That was a lot of ground to cover, but that does it for this round of PPC statistics.

I hope you enjoyed learning about all of the different paid marketing platforms and I hope this helped you with your PPC strategy.

Now, I want to hear from you!

Let me know in the comments below which PPC stat surprised you the most or which platform you’re planning on spending more time on this year.