Australia’s total online advertising spend has continued to climb in 2019, reaching $2.2 billion for Q1, representing 4.9 per cent year on year growth.

The figures, collected by the IAB Australian Online Advertising Expenditure Report (OAER) and published by PwC, show that search and directories now have an overall share of online advertising of 44 per cent ($977.6m for the quarter).

Classifieds had the fastest annual growth, up 7.3 per cent from 2018 to reach $426.2m, representing a 20 per cent market share.

IAB Australia CEO Gai Le Roy said: “There is little doubt that the advertising market is tough across all platforms, but within the breadth of digital advertising there were still bright spots.

“The classifieds sector again had a strong March quarter and the display market saw an increased share for government/political spend which will continue into the June quarter numbers.”

In the general display sector, video represented the largest share at 46 per cent, followed by native, content and infeed at 35 per cent and general standard display formats at 18 per cent.

Although still total online advertising spend is increasing year on year, expenditure in Q1 2019 was slightly lower compared to December 2018.

This is consistent with previous years.

Programmatic spend down

When it came to the preferred buying method for display advertising viewed on content publisher’s inventory, 58 per cent bought via media agencies through an IO/non-programmatic method.

The share of general display advertising bought programmatically was down 5 per cent overall from the prior quarter.

A total of 23 per cent of the general display advertising was bought with a variable CPM based on real time bidding via an exchange on private market place and six per cent with fixed CPM and guaranteed inventory.

Video advertisement was primarily viewed via desktop (39 per cent)in the March quarter, followed by a connected TV (32 per cent) and mobile (29 per cent).