Global ad spend for the month of March saw a decline across most categories, according to the latest data from adtech company PubMatic.
Ad spend across categories including careers, automotive, health and fitness, shopping and pets has declined since the first half of March when PubMatic first released data.
The travel and sports categories saw the biggest decline, 90% and 69% respectively, amid the global COVID-19 pandemic as people were forced into lockdowns around the world.
Advertisers in the law, government and politics (64%) and real estate (49%) categories also dropped their spend significantly.
Ad spend in the news category saw the biggest jump, rising 82%, as people continued to consume more news content to stay up to date with the pandemic's latest developments.
Education (32%), hobbies and interests (30%), food and drink (20%) and technology and computing (7%) were among the few categories that received a bump in ad spend throughout March.
Effective cost per thousand impressions (eCPM) increased dramatically for the news category by 132% in the last week of the month when compared to the first.
Despite the decline in ad spend, science and travel experienced increases in eCPM by 35% and 22% respectively.
The eCPM for the pets category saw the biggest decline by 62% when comparing the first and last week of the month.
PubMatic’s data analytics team analyses more than 13 trillion global advertiser bids on a monthly basis, utilising the company’s best-in-class analytics capabilities. This snapshot is based on PubMatic-sourced operational data.
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