Marketing intelligence service WARK has reported some 2018 projections for global advertising spend, based on data from 12 major markets: Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Russia, the UK and the USA.

Some key numbers:

• Search advertising spend in these 12 markets in 2018 will total $100.5B, up 11% from 2017.
• Of that, $62.7B - 62.4% of total - will be spent on mobile ads.
• 2018 search share of ad spend:
  • Globally 20%+
  • USA 22%
  • China 26%
  • UK nearly 30%
• Most growth in search ad spend share has been at the expense of display advertising.
• Google will be #1 in ad revenues, possibly up as much as 20% from $85.8B in 2017.

With total search advertising spend increasing at the rate of 11% a year - driven primarily by rapid gains in mobile ad spend - is it any wonder that Google is pursuing a mobile first approach to search?

Quoting from Google's Best Practices for Mobile-First Indexing :

"Mobile-first indexing means Google will predominantly use the mobile version of the content for indexing and ranking...Since the majority of users now access Google via a mobile device, the index will primarily use the mobile version of a page's content going forward. We aren't creating a separate mobile-first index. We continue to use only one index."