Press release: Nexoya trend report provides data-driven insight into Swiss digital advertising market: budgets growing again

There is still potential in the summer months. Microsoft Ads is gaining in importance. Display remains the most popular channel.

Zurich/Berlin, 23 March 2022 – Nexoya optimizes digital multi-channel marketing campaigns based on artificial intelligence. The marketing analytics start-up manages over six percent of total digital advertising spend in Switzerland in its SaaS platform. Based on aggregated, anonymized, and standardized data from its customers, Nexoya has published exclusive insights into the Swiss advertising market from 2020 and 2021. The evaluation provides advertisers with answers to questions such as: Which channels work best and when? How do Microsoft Ads compare to Google Ads? What are common trends of different media over weeks or a year?

Key findings:

1. After falling for the first time in 2020, overall digital ad spend has risen significantly since Q4 2021.
2. To achieve maximum performance, digital marketing should leverage seasonality. An omnichannel view is critical because not all channels have the same seasonalities.
3. Microsoft Ads is becoming more and more important in Switzerland. At the moment, many opportunities are opening up here, as the competition is still small. This means that high click-through rates (CTR) can be achieved.

The report “Digital Advertising: Trends for 2022” can be downloaded free of charge at:
https://www.nexoya.com/resource_gallery/trend-report/

Advertising spending in Switzerland is recovering. Last year, they were almost back at the same level as before the pandemic-related decline in 2020: The first lockdown in March 2020 was followed by a Swiss-wide reduction in advertising spending, and they remained at a low level for the rest of the year. The trend continued in the first half of 2021. Since the fourth quarter of 2021, budgets have been back on a clear growth track. The development has continued so far this year.

Seasonality: Summer still has potential

The fourth quarter is by far the most advertising-intensive time of the year. In November, advertisers invest the most money in digital ads. The high activity leads to very high cost-per-click (CPC) and cost-per-lead (CPL). The summer months tend to be quieter: advertising spend is lowest year-on-year in July, followed by March. Thus, with their comparatively low CPC, especially for search engine advertising, these periods offer the realistic potential for advertisers.

“Marketers should consider how they can cleverly leverage the seasonality of different channels to boost the performance of their campaigns. It can be worthwhile to consider the months and individual days of the week in the different channels,” says Flavia Wagner, Head of Customer

Experience, nexoya. For example, Social Media ads have a higher CPC on Fridays and Saturdays than on other days, Search has a higher CPC during the week and Display shows its peak value in the middle of the week.

“The report points out that costs in the digital advertising market are very dynamic. The fixed placement of budgets per channel in marketing is not very promising under these conditions. Agile adjustment of budgets and dynamic shifting between channels can significantly improve performance – as long as the dynamics are taken into account. Predictive analytics and artificial intelligence help marketing teams identify underlying trends. With automation, the effort can be reduced at the same time. This allows for much better performance,” explains Flavia Wagner.

Microsoft Advertising is gaining in importance

Google still collects the most budgets in the Search Ads segment. However, Microsoft Ads, formerly Bing Advertising, achieves higher conversion rates at a lower CPC compared to Google Ads. It is lowest at the beginning of the year and then increases over time. For Google Ads, the CPC increases significantly in the fourth quarter. In October, Google Ads was even the most expensive digital advertising channel in terms of CPC. In the summer, the costs are lower. Even though the capacity of Microsoft Ads is still small in terms of share of potential impressions, it has been growing since last year.

“Marketing teams should keep an eye on Microsoft Ads to avoid missing out on leads here. For an optimal result, both Google Ads and Microsoft Ads belong in today’s marketing strategy,” emphasizes Flavia Wagner.

Display remains the most popular channel

Display ads account for most digital advertising spend in Switzerland with a share of over 50 percent, followed by search with 26 percent and social media with over 23 percent. Especially in the summer months, budgets shift from display to Facebook and Instagram. Display is the most expensive channel in terms of CPC and CPL. Costs peak in late summer. The ideal advertising strategy relies on all platforms simultaneously.

Knowledge is power

Knowing the trends throughout the year and week helps marketing teams determine which tactics to pursue and where to focus. In addition, AI-based analysis of the data can assess the impact of advertising on sales, leads, and micro-conversions. And not just far into the past, but into the future.

“The ability to benchmark one’s results against industry values provides exciting insights for future marketing strategies. With the help of state-of-the-art AI methods, it is even possible to go one step further and compare live active campaigns against benchmarks and thus optimize them. For example, nexoya’s AI algorithm optimizes budget distribution across all marketing channels using millions of signals from the market. In this way, it determines the optimal distribution of budgets to achieve the best performance,” says Marco Hochstrasser, co-founder and CEO, nexoya.

Download Report “Digital Advertising: Trends for 2022”: https://www.nexoya.com/resource_gallery/trend-report/

After a significant decline due to the pandemic in 2020, advertising spend has been growing strongly again since the fourth quarter of 2021 (Graphic: nexoya Ltd.) Download: https://www.nexoya.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Normalized-ad-spend-per-advertiser-1.png

Microsoft Ads achieves higher conversion rates with a lower CPL compared to Google Ads and therefore belongs to the marketing strategy (Graphic: nexoya Ltd.) Download: https://www.nexoya.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Average-CPC-Search.png

Microsoft Ads achieves higher conversion rates with a lower CPL compared to Google Ads and therefore belongs to the marketing strategy (Graphic: nexoya Ltd.) Download: https://www.nexoya.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Average-CTR-Search.png

Display remains by far the most popular channel for digital advertising (Graphic: nexoya Ltd.) Download: https://www.nexoya.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Distribution-of-ad-spend-per-category-during-2020-2021.png

The CPC sometimes varies significantly depending on the month between the different social media channels (Graphic: nexoya Ltd.) Download: https://www.nexoya.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Average-CPC-Social.png

(Graphic: Nexoya Ltd.) Download: https://www.nexoya.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Average-CTR-Social.png

About nexoya
The startup Nexoya ltd with the headquarter in Zürich, is since 2018 developing a platform for automatic analysis for digital marketing of mid-to large size corporates – with high usability and high data privacy focus. On the basis of Machine Learning, the SaaS Platform “nexoya Marketing Analytics” optimizes multi-channel marketing campaigns. It aggregates all relevant metrics out of various channels such as google, instagram or facebook, allowing you to have well-arranged reporting and monitoring of your KPIs. On the basis of the gathered data and thanks to Artificial Intelligence (Predictive Analytics) nexoya optimizes your campaign budget thereafter. With that it helps Marketing teams to reduce their operational efforts, simplify automated data-driven decisions and reduce your ad-spend by up to 30%. Nexoya is only gathering non personalized data and is hosting strictly in certified datacenters in Switzerland. Customers are well-known businesses such as Emmi Group, Generali, CSS or the house agency. www.nexoya.com

Press contact
Sabrina Ortmann, nexoya
Phone: +49 (0)30 54909240
E-Mail: press@nexoya.com