Over the past several years, search advertising has become a mainstream component of many companies’ advertising plans. But search advertising is evolving, with new capabilities such as local search and mobile search coming on strong.

A recent survey conducted by Econsultancy in partnership with agency Guava provides some details on this important communication channel.

The study

The survey looked at a variety of search topics, including mobile search, local search, Google Instant, and the growth of other PPC platforms.

It was conducted online and included 600 client facing digital marketers reporting on their own company activities and agencies reporting on their clients’ activities.

The study is interesting in that the include companies covered a wide spectrum of industry sectors, with Retail being the largest, followed by Financial, Travel, and Marketing.

Search on the rise

Guava stated that “Companies are continuing to increase the proportion of their marketing investment on Search, with the clients surveyed reporting a spend of 22% of their total marketing budget in this area.”

The survey found that advertisers had increased their spending across a variety of PPC platforms. For example, 67% of advertisers had increased their budget for Google compared to only 12% reducing it.

Other popular platforms seeing budget increases include Facebook (65%), LinkedIn (62%), YouTube (55%) and Twitter (54%).

Local search growing rapidly

The report found that 30% of companies use local search as a marketing tool currently, whereas last year the figure was slightly lower at 27%. However, this category is expected to grow very rapidly as a further 21% of companies said they planned to use local search next year.

In terms of overall budget, the agencies responded that 22% of their client budget was spent on local search ads.

Interestingly the same report in the US found agencies reporting 37% of budget was spent on local search. This difference may be due to the size difference between the two countries, with localization being more critical in the much larger US territory.

Mobile search also growing

According to this survey, the portion of companies using mobile search is lower, but growing more rapidly. Only 16% of companies reported using mobile search, but this is double the 8% that reported doing so in 2010. And this growth should continue to increase with a further 45% planning to use mobile search in the near future.

From the Agency perspective, about a third say that their clients are involved with mobile search, and the typical spend is about 5% of the paid search budget.