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We are thrilled to announce our new partnership with Nielsen, a global measurement and data analytics company that provides the most complete and trusted view available of consumers and markets worldwide. Nielsen is divided into two business units.

Nielsen Ad Intel, with the help of The Search Monitor, is expanding its digital footprint by launching search data as a new media type and offering more robust, relevant and richer digital advertising data first for existing mobile, desktop, display and video placements and in the future, for social and in-app platforms. The breadth and depth of the solution enables an increased level of measurement and visibility into advertising spend that is needed in today’s constantly changing advertising models.

How does seasonality impact clickthrough rates (CTRs)?

The chart below shows CTR benchmarks for five key PPC verticals—Retail, Finance, Travel, Auto, and Telecom—during the past four quarters, and for two important benchmark groups:

• The Search Monitor’s top-tier advertisers (the group of 10 advertisers who received the most clicks during the quarter)
• The Search Monitor’s middle-tier advertisers (the group of 10 advertisers whose click volumes represented the middle of the click volume witnessed during the quarter)

How do these trends compare with your clickthrough rate data?

How does seasonality impact your cost per clicks (CPC)?  The chart below shows CPC trends for five key PPC verticals—Retail, Finance, Travel, Auto, and Telecom—over the past 4 quarters.

The Search Monitor platform allows search marketers to customize the most representative performance benchmark for their business. For these charts, however, we calculated two of the most helpful ones:

While you might think you’re generating the right amount of clicks from your paid ads, how can you be certain without comparing your CTR against industry benchmarks?

The chart below shows CTR benchmarks for five key PPC verticals: Retail, Finance, Travel, Auto, and Telecom. We also included benchmarks for both top-tier and middle-tier advertisers.

Cost Per Click is another key performance indicator that every search marketer should monitor on a regular basis.

The chart below shows CPC benchmarks for five key PPC verticals: Retail, Finance, Travel, Auto, and Telecom. Further, we included benchmarks for both top-tier and middle-tier advertisers.

The chart below comes from Q2 2015 PPC Benchmark Guide for Search Marketers and provides ad rank data for five important PPC verticals.

For each vertical, we show the ad rank for US Google and Bing searches (desktop and mobile) for both our top-tier and middle-tier advertisers. The Search Monitor’s clients use this benchmark data by tier to ensure that they are performing better than the middle, but aiming for the top.

Do you know how many advertisers bid on your keywords?

It’s a crucial benchmark for your performance since it impacts just about every KPI (rank, clicks, spend, share, etc.).

The chart below comes from our PPC Benchmark Guide for Search Marketers and shows the number of advertisers on different verticals of keywords during Q2 of 2015.

The data below comes from our Lighthouse product which focuses on click and spend benchmarks across 1,239 verticals. The chart focuses on five top spending groups within our Automotive verticals.

Typically advertisers fall on a 45-degree line going from bottom-left to top-right, where higher bids lead to better ranks and more clicks. Here, we see two categories—Vehicle Auctions and Parts & Accessories—where they either over-spending or under-spending the other groups.

Each week, The Search Monitor chooses one industry from our list of 1,239 industries for a weekly snapshot of SEM activity. This week, we had two topics that we wanted to cover.

So in addition to yesterday’s post on financial aid advertisers, we are focusing this post on automotive advertisers.

We love helping our travel clients better monitor their online advertising.

So, we’re happy to report we have added new geo-targeted hotel keywords into the Travel vertical for our competitive ad monitoring product, Lighthouse. The keywords cover mostly lodging searches for the 220 largest cities in the US, plus smaller, heavily searched travel destinations (such as Aspen).