Brief:

• Marketers will boost the portion of their search advertising budgets on mobile media to 80% by the end of 2021 from about two-thirds this year, according to a forecast by researcher eMarketer. The mobile growth will follow a shift in consumer behavior, as more people use their smartphones to find nearby businesses like restaurants, movie theaters or locations, MediaPost reported.
• EMarketer estimated 71.5% of the U.S. population, or 85% of internet users, will use a search engine like Google at least once a month this year. About three in five mobile consumers use a search engine regularly in 2017, compared with less than half as recently as 2015.
• Mobile ad spend in the U.S. will grow about 22% this year to $57 billion, eMarketer estimates. Google will receive one-third of all U.S. mobile ad dollars this year, or nearly $19 billion, while Facebook will capture about 27%, or $15.3 billion, of the mobile market.

Insight:

The U.S. internet search market has matured in the past 20 years, but is still growing at double-digit rates because of smartphone media, eMarketer said. Marketers are recognizing the shift in behavior and will continue to dedicate more of their media dollars to mobile platforms. Spending on mobile search will rise 25% this year as advertisers shift their budgets away from desktop- and laptop-based search placements.

Google has a near monopoly with 97% of smartphone search ad clicks, according to Merkle’s “Q2 2017 Digital Marketing Report” cited by eMarketer. The company’s ad growth is clearly more dependent on mobile platforms than ever before.

While keyword targeting remains the basis of search ads, search marketers are turning to additional targeting options that include demographics, location and other forms of audience targeting. Voice search with digital assistants, such as Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri, are the “next big thing” in search, according to a BrightEdge survey of U.S. marketing leaders in May. Visual search based on images, which companies like Google and Pinterest have developed, is also expected to become more popular.