Advertising reports: Traders move from text ads to product listings

Lured by cheap clicks and high clicks, merchants moved more ads from text ADS to Product list ads, Marin software in a new report. To pinpoint the big business, the report focuses on advertisers and organisations that spend more than 100,000 dollars a month on search-engine advertising, and finds that product list ads have risen steadily in the past few months, up 19% per cent year-on-year in August this year.

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The study shows that since November 2012, product list ads have been higher than the average text ads, and this year in June and July, the maximum difference between the hits 21%. Product listings after a significant increase in the late 2012, the proportion of text advertising has remained relatively stable at the beginning of this year, until 6 July, when the share of product listings has fallen again. Still, Marin believes that as Google expands its advertising business to mobile devices, the proportion of product listings will rise again.

At the same time, product list ads continued to climb at a rate of 53% per cent year-on-year in July this year, and researchers attributed the reason to increasing competition. Nevertheless, the cost per click of the product list ad is still lower than the average text ad.

Since product list ads are cheaper and more effective (from a CTR perspective), the share of product listings in July this year has increased by more than a year over the same period, so it's not surprising that businesses are redistributing their prices. In fact, businesses spent the holiday of June this year spending the same amount of money on product listings as the November 2012 holiday season.

About data: Marin's research focuses on a representative group of ads: Google's generic text ads and product listings. The Marin incorporates key data from the month before January 2012 and highlights the overall trend rather than simply exposing the data.