Despite the war, Ukrainian business continues to work and again uses digital advertising. While working with clients, we noticed certain anomalies in the cost of placement, which we decided to investigate in more detail. In this article, mediaplaner newage. Ph.D. in Economics, Dmytro Konovalenko, will share our observations of how the cost of advertising is changing, in order to record the state of the market at the beginning of autumn 2022. And also argues the assumptions why prices change in this way.
Researched Tools, Costs and Formats
The first thing we noticed in the campaigns for the Ukrainian audience was a striking decrease in prices (CPM, CPC, CPV) for displaying banner and video ads. We currently have the most complete data on the Google Ads and Display & Video 360 advertising cabinets, so we investigated the cost of the formats available on these platforms.
To understand the scale of the changes, we compared the current prices in 2022 with the value before the New Year boom and the November sales. In all further illustrations, 100 percent are the prices of August-October 2021. If the indicator is more than 100, then in this period compared to the base, the price has increased, and less than 100 – it has decreased.
The percentage increase or decrease takes into account the change in the exchange rate of the hryvnia against the dollar, so the following refers to the net changes at the beginning of September 2022. And another important point regarding the cost are spending — it is calculated as an average for a month in each period.
CPM Change by Ad Formats
How Much Does Video Advertising in Google Ads Cost in 2022
In-stream advertising in Google Ads has fallen in price four times compared to the base period of last year. Prices have fallen in both CPV and CPM terms.
In In-stream, e-commerce companies are mostly responsible for the price formation in Google in August 2022, the share of which in the total data by format is 80%. In general, if we take the same timing of the same advertiser on identical YouTube channels and compare the prices, we also see a drop and this ratio is true.
In DV, one advertiser is responsible for the formation of video prices in July and September, so it is difficult to draw conclusions. But in general, we note a price decrease compared to the base period.
How Much Does Banner Advertising Cost in Google Ads in 2022
Banner ads in Google Ads are down 37% compared to the calm times of last year.
According to the banner for May-July, there was also a change of advertisers – one became the price maker, which accounted for 60% of the costs, and for which the price soared; this could distort the data somewhat.
For the period May-July 2022, it is not very representative, but we can state that e-commerce companies have become the price makers here, and in general, in principle, an adequate price is observed with little competition.
How Much Does Video Advertising in DV360 in 2022
On DV360, everything is a bit more complicated. The price has decreased significantly compared to the pre-war period.
The price drop is more than in Google Ads, so it’s hard to explain, but there are several versions. Publishers could lower the entrance threshold to access their platforms. Or, it is hinted that DV360 changes the approach data-driven creatives in general — it is planned to introduce an additional fee for their use. Therefore, it is possible that during the transition period, they removed the margin that had been sewn before that. But these are just our assumptions.
How Much Does Search Advertising Cost in 2022
If we talk about search advertising, then in 2022, we will see scant search volumes among our clients compared to the pre-war situation. This is only 4% of the volumes that were before. For May-July 2022, prices almost did not change, because there were very small volumes, but according to the hottest requests.
The significant decrease in prices in August can be attributed to the increase in value and volume for price-forming advertisers. Comparing the same campaign in August 2022 and before the full-scale offensive, the prices increased a lot. Therefore, it can be stated that despite the small volumes, the prices have increased.
How Much are Performance Max and The Rest of The Formats in 2022
In the following illustration, we have collected data on performance formats. In general, as an agency, we work less with performance, but recently clients need more such advertising, so we have data to analyze the price of advertising.
What is interesting here is the Performance Max campaign: despite the meager search volumes, advertisers were very strongly promoting Performance Max. In August 2022, spending on all formats presented in the table, except for Performance Max, is half the budget allocated to it. It can be stated that the share of this “black box” with artificial intelligence is increasing.
We must also say about the rest of the video formats: Non-skip, Bumper, Video Action — we don’t have enough information for each of them separately, so we combined them into one block.
Regarding Performance Max, there is news that now you can make a breakdown and see which part of Shopping and Search this format is allocated to.
How Advertising Prices Have Changed in 2022 in The World
While investigating the issue of the abnormally low cost in the banner and DV360, we decided to analyze how prices have changed in other countries around the world. In the graph below, the blue bars show the current price level and the gray bars show the price level as of October 2021. The result of the comparison is as follows:
There are some countries where there is a drop of 40+% — Ireland, Cyprus, Portugal. At the same time, there are countries where the price has increased – Norway, Malta, Estonia, etc. Accordingly, the hypothesis that the decline in prices in Ukraine is related to a global anomaly or failure in DV360 pricing is refuted.
So we decided to test the intuitive assumption that the cost of advertising is related to the level of the country’s economy. We took World Bank data on GDP per capita at purchasing power parity. To put it very simply: the higher this indicator is, the stronger the economy is considered to be.
Overlaying the World Bank data on CPM data shows the same relationship: the stronger the economy, the higher the auction price for advertisers. On the graph, we can see the extremes – these are the USA, Qatar and Saudi Arabia.
Therefore, this understanding can provide a basic understanding of the advertising market when entering new markets and setting up advertising in new countries.
Conclusions
- It is necessary to understand that not all the data described above are homogeneous, so they contain errors in one way or another.
- We currently recommend using banner advertising in DV360 as the format that has lost the most in price while maintaining effectiveness.
- In the period after the beginning of the full-scale offensive of the Russian Federation, we see a trend towards more use of performance advertising and less use of brand and image advertising. Therefore, the cost of formats aimed at conversion fell less, and in some places even increased.
- This drop in prices in DV360 is not related to any global changes in Google’s advertising formats, because a similar situation is not observed in other countries.
- We tested and confirmed the hypothesis that the correlation between the cost of advertising and the economy of the country., with a few exceptions.
