Social search, where brands integrate their search and social marketing is seeing a huge rise and brands are seeing a tangible business return for social engagement, according to Kenshoo.
Kenshoo says that while it's from a low base, investment in social ads is growing at 191%. During the same period search revenue increased 12%.
Michel Van Woudenberg, Kenshoo managing director, told AdNews the growth of social search is “crazy” and while search still dominates digital marketing spend, social is growing much faster.
Kenshoo is ramping up its efforts in the space as more clients look into combining search and social and has tripled its own manpower working in the space in the last three months in the APAC region.
The ability to plug search data in to social platforms and target the search results and creative has seen a 200% uplift in conversion rates and 40% decrease in cost of conversion in clients who have opted to combine social and search, said Van Woudenberg.
“You’re taking the learnings from search and applying it to social so the ROI on ad spend is going up,” he said, adding that the results clients are seeing demonstrates the power of combining search and social and not treating them as siloed disciplines.
“As advertisers and agencies start to look at things outside of silos, not as a search budget or a social budget but as a marketing budget, they can optimise across channels and make spend decisions holistically.”
During the first quarter Kenshoo claims search ad spend increased 10% while social spend increased 37% year on year.
Kenshoo created an infographic showing the changes in social and search investment in the last year. You can view the full graphic here.
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