IAB Report Shows That Search Represented 50 percent Of U.S. Digital Ad Spend In 2014

According to the latest figures from the Internet Ad Bureau (IAB), digital advertising spend set a record in 2014, reaching $49.5 billion in the United States. Although channels like mobile and social experienced the most growth, search remained the biggest segment overall.

The following chart from the IAB report shows the year-by-year growth of overall digital ad spend since 2005:

The report indicates that mobile advertising was the biggest growth segment, increasing 76 percent year-over-year from 2013 to 2014. Social media advertising experienced the second largest increase, with 57 percent growth. Although search revenues only grew by 3 percent, it was the largest overall advertising spend segment in 2014, at 38 percent of the overall share with spend of $18.4 billion. However, it’s important to note that the IAB’s search figure only represents desktop search, and doesn’t include mobile. As you can see in the following chart, mobile search has been removed from “search” and placed into “mobile”:

Marketing Land provided some important analysis to better understand what’s happening overall, by calculating the spend of mobile search and display and adding it to desktop search and display to determine combined figures. The following image shows the result of the additional analysis, as well as a breakdown of the separate segments ranked in order by revenue spend:

Marketing Land explains that if all of these categories are added up, they will equal more than 100 percent because some categories include spend from others. However, the percentage for each does illustrate how much each category amounts to in spend versus the overall spend. For search overall, it’s approximately 50 percent of all digital ad spend, or $24.6 billion. Desktop search is 38 percent, or $19 billion, and mobile search is 11 percent, or $5.6 billion.

Desktop display was found to be the second largest spend segment, at 27 percent of overall digital ad spend. The IAB describes display as banners, video, rich media and sponsorships, which are also broken down into individual components. Mobile was found to be the third largest, at 25 percent. However, as we already shared from Marketing Land’s analysis, “mobile” is actually spend that is pulled out of the search and display areas.

The image above clearly illustrates the fact that desktop continues to dominate spend in individual categories. However, mobile represents a very significant overall percentage, at 25 percent, with its biggest individual slice being mobile display at 13 percent, followed by mobile search at 11 percent.

For further details, IAB’s full report is available here.