Internet marketing spend in Australia for 2006

The Online Advertising Expenditure Report for 2006, published by the Audit Bureau of Verification Services (ABVS), showed that the Internet advertising sector broke through the AU$1 billion barrier for the first time during the year. At the reported rate of growth, online advertising is expected to be the 3rd largest medium in Australia by the end of 2007, after newspapers and television.

The data for 2006 shows a 61% growth for online advertising compared to 2005, with a total spend for the year of AU$1,001m. The share of total spend during the year was 30% for General Advertising (e.g. banner adverts, email and affiliate marketing), a reduction in share for Classified Advertising to 30% and another annual growth in share to just under 40% for Search & Directories Advertising.

Therefore the search category continues to see the biggest growth and now clearly holds the largest share of the online advertising market - since the 2005 survey, spend on search marketing has grown by 81% to AU$399m. This reflects the increasing importance of search to generate highly targeted and quantifiable traffic to business websites, with many more companies now starting to compete in this area. General advertising grew by 56% to AU$303m and classifieds grew by 45% to AU$299m.

This Online Advertising Expenditure Report is the last to be provided by ABVS before a new series of audit reports are published by PricewaterhouseCoopers. The current report is based on information provided by a number of leading publishers and portals in Australia and it contains half yearly and quarterly analysis with a 2005 comparison, plus additional data about spend within industry categories attracting general revenue as well as reporting trends in classifieds revenue.

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