Digital 2025: global advertising trends
Statista’s Market Insights data shows that the world’s marketers spent close to US$1.1 trillion on ads in 2024, with global spend increasing by $75 billion – 7.3 percent – compared with 2023 levels.
Moreover, Statista’s data indicates that global ad spend has increased by more than 50 percent since 2019, with digital advertising responsible for the vast majority of that increase.
Ad spend vs GDP
These latest figures suggest that advertising now accounts for roughly 1 percent of global GDP, although that figure varies considerably by country.
For example, Statista’s data suggests that the UK sees some of the highest relative levels of spend, with advertising investments equivalent to 1.66 percent of the country’s total GDP.
Similarly, ad spend in the USA equates to almost 1.5 percent of GDP, while Japan and China also see relatively high rates of investment.
However, at the other end of the spectrum, ad spend in Pakistan equates to just 0.18 percent of GDP, while figures are also below a quarter of a percent in Saudi Arabia and Turkey.
Changing channels
Digital channels now account for 72.7 percent of worldwide ad investment, with online spend exceeding US$790 billion in 2024.
And these latest figures are testament to the dramatic shift in the balance of advertising spend since the outbreak of Covid-19.
As recently as 2018, digital channels account for just under half of global ad spend.
By 2019, that figure had grown to 54.3 percent, but share then jumped by a relative 13 percent in 2020, as Covid lockdowns drove marketers to embrace a markedly different mix of channels.
However, marketing spend didn’t then revert to pre-Covid patterns after the easing of restrictions, and digital has continued to take share from “offline” channels every year since.
Absolute levels of digital spend continue to enjoy double-digital growth too, with Statista reporting a year-on-year increase of 10.3 percent (+$74 billion) between 2023 and 2024.
And in fact, digital ad spend has more than doubled since 2019, with Statista reporting a hefty 30-percent jump in total spend between 2020 and 2021.
Considered investments
The relative ease and cost of buying online ads may help to explain digital’s rapid ascent, especially when we consider the role that self-service social media advertising plays for small and medium-sized businesses.
However, the imbalance we see between investments in online and offline channels doesn’t actually match the role that each channel plays in delivering marketing objectives.
For example, while GWI’s research shows that digital marketing activities introduce brands and products to more than 9 in 10 adult internet users, offline channels still offer powerful opportunities to influence the world’s consumers.
Indeed, GWI’s data indicates that nearly three-quarters of internet users – 73 percent – still regularly discover new brands and products through “traditional” media like TV, print, and radio.
And with ad spend continuing to move away from these media, you may find that companies selling placements on “traditional” media offer increasingly competitive opportunities to reach the audiences that matter to your brand.
So, if you have the resources to embrace channels like TV, you might want to think about recalibrating your mix so that it reflects the realities of your audiences’ behaviours, as well as the associated costs of achieving your objectives.
Quantifying audience value
For added perspective, Statista reports that – across all channels, both online and offline – marketers spend an average of US$140 per head of population on advertising.
However, that average varies significantly from market to market.
The United States sees the highest levels of ad spend per capita, with the country’s total ad investments equivalent to US$1,246 per person in 2024.
Per capita spend is also relatively high in the UK, where marketers spend an average of US$876 on ads per person, per year.
However, the equivalent figures are considerably lower across less developed economies.
For example, ad spend in Mexico equated to less than US$80 per head in 2024, and the figure was less than $3 per person in Pakistan.
The state of digital advertising
Returning our attention to digital ads, data shows that the balance of spend across platforms and technologies continues to evolve.
For example, mobile continues to claim an ever greater share of spend compared with desktop, with Statista’s latest figures indicating that mobile accounted for almost two-thirds of digital investments in 2024.
As always, the balance varies meaningfully by country – as you can see in our full report – but the overall trend is clearly towards mobile, with 2024’s figure of 65.3 percent already meaningfully higher than the 52.7 percent that Statista reports for 2019.
Programmatic ads
On the supply side, programmatic services also continue to gain momentum, with Statista’s Advertising & Media Market data putting dynamic distribution’s share at 82.4 percent of spend in 2024.
That share figure increased by a relative 1.6 percent over the past 12 months, while 2024’s figure is 8.6 percent higher than the 75.9 percent that the company reports for 2019.
In total, businesses spent more than US$650 billion on programmatic placements in 2024, with that absolute spend figure more than 12 percent higher than the total for the previous year.
Search still finding favour
Search continues to attract the lion’s share of digital channel revenues, with Statista attributing 40 percent of 2024 digital spend to online search platforms.
It’s interesting to note that search’s share of digital spend dipped slightly after the outbreak of Covid-19 in 2020, but platforms like Google have seen their share of the digital pie increase every year since.
Overall, search platforms earned more than US$316 billion in ad revenue during 2024, with that total more than 12 percent higher than the equivalent figure for 2023.
There are some warning signs in the data though, with Skai reporting that spend on search ads in the last three months of 2024 was actually 2 percent lower than spend in the equivalent period of 2023.
Moreover, the number of search impressions served saw an even bigger drop, with Skai’s analysis pointing to a 14 percent year-on-year decline between Q4 2023 and Q4 2024.
However, click-through rates improved significantly during that same period, from 1.6 percent in Q4 2023, to 1.86 percent in the last three months of 2024.
On a relative basis, that’s a 16 percent improvement in search clicks, which helps to explain why the average cost per click (CPC) only declined by US$0.01 during the same period.
Shopping around
Meanwhile, it’s particularly interesting to note the rise of advertising on online retail platforms like Amazon.
Statista reports that online retail platform advertising accounted for more than 1 in 5 digital ad dollars around the world last year, with these channels claiming 21.2 percent of global digital ad spend in 2024.
And for perspective, that figure is almost double the 10.9 percent share that these platforms claimed in 2019.
In total, Statista reports that online retailers earned more than US$167 billion from ad placements on their platforms in 2024, suggesting that this channel is increasingly important for consumer goods marketing.
Social climbing
Statista’s data suggests that 2024 was a particularly good year for social media platforms too, with global spend on social media ads increasing by 15 percent compared with 2023.
Figures indicate that marketers spent close to a quarter of a trillion US dollars on social media ads in 2024, with these placements responsible for more than 3 in every 10 dollars spent on digital advertising.
And if we compare these social media ad spend figures with our latest data for social media user identities, the data suggest that the world’s marketers spend an average of US$46.47 per user to reach social audiences.
Once again, that figure varies meaningfully by country though, from a hefty US$335 per user in the United States, to just 86 cents (USD) in Pakistan.
However, the latest data from Skai suggests that average social media CPMs slipped in Q4 2024 compared with the same period a year ago.
The company’s analysis of billions of dollars of ad spend indicates that advertisers spent an average of US$5.69 to deliver 1,000 ad impressions on social platforms between October and December 2024, which was 4.4 percent lower than the US$5.83 they spent in the 2023 “holiday” quarter.
On the other hand though, Skai’s data also shows that the total number of impressions served across social platforms in Q4 2024 was roughly 4 percent higher than the figure for the same period a year earlier.
And similarly, the company’s analysis indicates that total spend on social media ads in the last three months of 2024 was roughly 2 percent higher than spend in the final quarter of 2023.
GET THE FULL PICTURE
This article is a sub-section of our Digital 2025 Global Overview Report.
Click here to access the complete report, and to read our comprehensive analysis.
Click here to see all of Simon’s articles, read his bio, and connect with him on social media.