Following a banner year, US ad spending in 2022 will be shaped by three key trends: Linear TV crossing the Rubicon, a billionaires’ club emerging in connected TV (CTV), and ecommerce ad spending enriching Google, Amazon, and a crop of newcomers in search and retail media.

Our latest forecasts for ad spending in Canada, which include our first-ever estimates for Google and Meta, show strong growth overall and an accelerated shift to digital.

For small and medium-sized companies, ad buys on Google and Meta have represented the bulk of their branding and performance-based marketing strategies.

In the rest of the world, Google and Meta reign supreme. Marketers need not overthink this. Read Next.

Consumers want control over their ad experiences: Google is taking steps toward greater personalization, but new data suggests that personalization experiences don’t always yield better results for advertisers.

Ad Revenues for Meta and Google by Key Market. Behind the Numbers.

Social Ad Spending Will Rise—and Overtake Google. TikTok may be the major story in ad revenue growth, but when put next to the market leaders, Google and Meta, its share of the market is far less impressive. Google’s share of the digital ad market will recede, and Meta’s will rise. Our forecast shows a slight decline in Google’s share, from 36.4% this year to 34.9% in 2024.

Despite Amazon’s incredible 2021 and the fact that Facebook weathered the pandemic better than Google last year, Google will still expand its lead on its two most prominent competitors. By the end of the year, the ad revenue gap between Google and Facebook will be wider than at any time since 2016. A Huge Cohort of Digital Ad Minnows Are Growing Like Gangbusters.

Google’s EU antitrust woes multiply: Sweden’s PriceRunner sues Google for skewing search results toward its own shopping service. The move could prompt more legal action from European shopping services.

As retail’s digital dominance grows, Google successfully captures retail ad dollars: Its investments in social commerce on YouTube and improvements to Google Shopping appear to have paid off.

Apple earnings show how much its ad business has grown amid iOS 14.5: App Store search ads have benefited greatly from its privacy update—something advertisers have known for a while and regulators won’t be able to ignore for long.

Examples include text ads in Google search results, Product Listing Ads in Google search results, and Amazon Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands. In 2021, US B2Bs will spend $5.36 billion on search ads. This is more than what they will allocate to display, but search’s growth rate isn’t as strong, increasing by just 19.5% from 2020.

I'm feeling lucky: Google's raking in search ad revenue

There is no global triopoly, but ecommerce is collectively challenging Google and Facebook. Google will claim 28.6% of the worldwide digital ad market this year, and Facebook will take 23.7%. The ecommerce heavyweights combined (Alibaba, Amazon, and JD.com) will take 15.9%. Read Next.

The dynamics in this space have altered slightly, though, with Google facing increasing competition. Google’s overall search ad revenues in the UK did manage to grow in 2020, by 2.0%, but its share of the total search market declined, from 72.6% in 2019 to 70.3%.

Traditionally, travel advertisers including online travel agencies are among the biggest search ad spenders on Google. That business tanked last year, but ecommerce-related search advertising outperformed thanks to the supercharged digital retail environment.