The crown weighs heavily on the head of your marketing leadership when making command decisions about resource allocation. The SEO long game is important, but reserving a budget for search engine marketing (SEM) can also be a smart play, including pay-per-click (PPC) marketing.
Snagging higher spots on SERPs can quickly boost traffic, and PPC strategies have been proven to increase conversion. How can a marketer confidently decide how much money to put where, and is it time to convince the finance team to boost the budget?
Free Guide, Template & Planner: How to Use Google Ads for Business
Backing up your decisions or budgetary requests with data is a smart move. To that end, we’ve compiled a long and useful list of PPC — on both search and social — and SEM statistics that marketers can use in 2023 to guide and validate important strategic choices in their marketing plans.
Table of Contents
- Search PPC Statistics
- Social PPC Statistics
- Search Engine Marketing Statistics
- User Behavior Statistics
- Paid Search Statistics
Search PPC Statistics
- 90% of internet users see Google ads.
- 46% of web users can’t tell the difference between PPC ads and organic search links.
- Yet 77% of the respondents in a Clutch survey from 2019 said they’re confident they can recognize search ads among SERP results.
- Google pay-per-click ads have the biggest ROI at 200%.
- Small to mid-sized companies pay $9k-$10k/month for an average PPC campaign.
- 72% of companies haven’t looked at their ad campaigns in over a month.
- 47% of all global purchases take place online.
- Paid search accounted for 39% of advertisers’ budgets.
- 65% of clicks on commercial keywords are sponsored results, compared to 35% for organic results.
- Facebook Ads and Google Ads are the paid ad channels with the highest reported ROI.
- PPC generates double the number of website visitors that SEO brings in.
- The average click-through rate for Google Ads across all industries is 18%.
- The average cost-per-click across all industries is $3.53.
- 96% of Google’s revenue comes from Google Ads.
- 65% of small to mid-sized businesses run PPC campaigns.
- 45% of small businesses have a paid search strategy in place, and 55% of them use display ads.
- 94% of people skip over search ads.
- 40% of advertisers say their PPC budget is lower than they’d like.
- A mere 10% of advertisers optimize their Google Ads account weekly.
- 54% of people don’t feel culturally represented in online ads.
- Customers are up to 70% more likely to buy your product when you use retargeting.
- 52% of PPC clicks come from mobile.
- Bing’s average CPC is $1.54 — that’s 33% lower than what we see on Google Ads.
- Ads can boost brand awareness by 80%.
- 97% of people used the web to find local businesses in 2022.
- A personalized PPC landing page will be 5% more effective.
- People are four times more likely to click on a Google PPC ad than on any other platform.
- 84% of brands polled said they see good results with the PPC market.
- 70% of marketers still consider SEO to be more effective than PPC.
- Algorithm updates don’t affect your PPC like they do SEO.
- With Google Ads, businesses earn, on average, $8 for every $1.60 spent.
- Consumers spend 10% more money in a store if they have clicked on the retailer’s Google search ad before visiting.
Social PPC Statistics
- Globally, 4.74 billion people use social media.
- Last year, in 2022, the pool of social media users grew 4.2%.
- Social ad spend in 2022 represented 33% of the total digital marketing spend.
- Over the course of 2022, the volume of social media ad impressions jumped by over 30%.
- Worldwide, the social media ad click-through rate (CTR) is 1.21%, but one year prior, it was higher — at 1.3%.
- Social media’s video ad spend at the end of 2022 was $24.35 billion — an increase of 20.1% over a one-year period.
- The largest social ad market in the world? The United States.
- Social media ad revenue is expected to balloon up to $385 billion by the year 2027.
- In Q3 of 2022, the cost-per-mille (CPM) for advertising on social media was $8.15, meaning advertisers had to pay that much to have their ads viewed by a thousand potential leads.
- According to a Hootsuite survey, 83% of marketers surveyed reported some measure of confidence in the ROI of social media, a 15% increase over the year before.
- 18 to 24-year-olds have 75% of the attention span of their elders — the 65+ demographic — when it comes to watching Facebook ad videos.
- The average Facebook user clicks on 12 Facebook ads every month.
- 9.21% of Facebook ads convert, which makes it the highest-converting platform available.
- Approximately 928.5 million people are reached by Instagram ads.
- 49% of internet users report being likely to purchase from brands they see ads for on social media.
- Snapchat ads are 7X more efficient at reaching Gen Z than TV ads.
Search Engine Marketing Statistics
- Around 93% of all virtual experiences, online interactions, and journeys begin with a search engine.
- Search marketing is 100 times more cost-efficient than other marketing strategies.
- SEM is the preferred choice of small businesses for online advertising — 45% of them invest in it.
- The average ROI for Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is 250%.
- Compared to social media, search engines generate approximately 300% more traffic to websites.
- About 40% of users abandon a website that takes 3+ seconds to load.
- A 1-second delay in page response time can result in a 7% decrease in conversions.
- Google processes over 8.5 billion searches every day.
- Google makes up 78% of all online search behavior.
- Zero-click searches on Google have been increasing: 25.6% of desktop and 17.3% of mobile searches end without a click to another Google property.
- 95.88% of Google searches are four words or more.
- Google handles a stunning 3.1 trillion searches each year.
- Google’s top 5 organic listings attract approximately 67.6% of all clicks.
- Around 15% of questions asked on Google have never been asked before.
- Baidu is the Google of China and holds 75.54% of the search market share.
- Reviews say Bing has better image search capabilities than Google.
- Google handles a stunning 3.1 trillion searches each year.
- Bing is the #2 search engine and gets over 1.2 billion visits every month.
User Behavior Statistics
- Before making a purchase, 88% of consumers do some kind of online research.
- About 50% of users are more inclined to click on a brand result if that brand appears multiple times in the SERP.
- Mobile search query terms “best” and “right now” have increased by 125% over the past two years.
- 43.2% of internet users 16 to 64 cite one of their primary reasons for using the internet is to research products and brands.
- 58% of internet users purchase products and services online on a weekly basis.
- In terms of search, mobile is ahead with 59% of searches. Desktop has fallen to 39%.
- 93% of consumers say online reviews influence their purchase decisions.
- 50.9% of internet users search for news and events — 43.4% search for products and brands.
- In the past two years, “Near Me” and “Where to buy” searches have doubled.
- Internet users are increasing by around 3.5% each year.
- Internet usage increased by 1355% from the beginning of 2000.
- China has the most internet users — 1050 million vs. the US at 311.3 million with India between them at 692 million.
- By 2025, it’s projected that about 73% of internet users will access it primarily through mobile devices.
- About 75% of search users never go beyond the first page of results.
Paid Search Statistics
- Organic and paid search make up 80% of all trackable website visits. The current split is 53% organic and 27% paid.
- 19% of marketers say paid search is their most profitable channel.
- B2B gets 12.3% of its traffic from paid search.
- Retail and ecommerce get 23.6% of their traffic from paid search.
- The highest-paid search CPC is in the legal industry and averages $6.75.
- The lowest CPC, $1.16, is in ecommerce.
- The highest paid ad conversion rate is in the dating and personals industry — 9.64%.
- The industry with the lowest paid ad conversion rate is, sadly, advocacy at 1.96%.
- The computer and electronics industry has the highest cost per conversion at $101.40.
- 74% of brands say that PPC ads are a huge driver for their business.
- Leads from search engines have a 14.6% close rate compared to outbound leads, which lag behind at a 1.7% close rate.