The Search Agency’s quarterly State of Paid Search report has found that for the first time, the average Google cost-per-click on tablet has exceeded desktop. It now stands 1.7 per cent higher. 

But the report also found that overall search clicks on tablet devices declined for the first time, dropping by 8 per cent from Q1 to Q2. Clicks across all devices fell too, by 9.5 per cent year-on-year. Smartphones were the only category to increase clicks during the last quarter, growing by 1.6 per cent, and saw the largest increase in advertiser spend at 25 per cent.

While paid search spend has increased 16 per cent over the year and impressions across all search engines have grown by 7.5 per cent, overall clicks decreased 6.4 per cent from Q1 to Q2 2013.

Google has shown a robust increase in its CPC, which was up 8.3 per cent across all devices over the year, with tablets growing 26 per cent in Q2. But Google’s click-through-rate actually fell from 3.5 per cent to 2.7 per cent quarter-on-quarter.

“The shift in consumer search from desktop to smartphones and tablets, coupled with advertiser adoption of Google’s Enhanced Campaigns, has caused increased competition for traffic across these new platforms and CPCs to spike,” said Keith Wilson, vice president of agency products at The Search Agency. “As a result, there was a noticeable divide between Google and Bing CPCs, with Bing CPCs experiencing a 1 per cent decline QoQ while Google CPCs increased 21 per cent.”