As consumers spend more time on their smartphones, some retailers spent more money on digital advertising to get in front of consumers on them in the third quarter of 2014.

That’s according to a report released by digital marketing agency Rimm Kaufman Group. The study shows that advertiser spending on smartphone ads has increased 117% over the past 12 months. The data come from RKG clients, which consist primarily of retailers.

Advertisers are spending more money on smartphone ads because more people are visiting web sites from their smartphones. Mobile traffic to web sites is up, from 30% to 38%, with traffic from smartphones making up more than half of that statistic.

Smartphone ad spending wasn’t the only growth area. Advertisers spent 73% more combined on Google and Bing product ads across all digital channels; product ads allow advertisers to include richer content than text-based ads. Google’s Product Listing Ads and Bing’s Product Ads both show a picture, a price and the name of the retailer to customers running a search.

The difference in return on investment between product and text ads was particularly stark on Bing, which showed a higher click-through (74%) and revenue-per-click rate (31%) for product ads than text ads.

Other key findings from the report:

• Paid search spending increased 26% across all search engines.

• Advertisers spent 27% more on paid search on Google and 24% more on Bing in Q3 of 2014 than they did during the same period last year.

• Facebook continued to drive the lion’s share of the traffic coming from social media sites, but Pinterest gaining ground in Q3. Facebook accounted for 53% of all traffic from social media sites in Q3, down from 60% a year ago. Pinterest and Twitter both gained, with the former going from 15% in 2013 to 18% in 2014 and the latter going from 3% to 4%.

 

 

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