Q2 2026 Ad Benchmarks: Microsoft CPCs +19%, Amazon DSP +67%

Q2 2026 digital ad benchmarks are out, and Tinuiti’s quarterly Digital Ads Benchmark Report — built on anonymized data from more than $4 billion in annual managed ad spend — tells one clear story: advertiser budgets are rotating toward Amazon’s ad stack at accelerating speed while Google’s text-search auction sits nearly flat on price.

The numbers that matter most are the ones moving against each other. Microsoft Advertising CPCs rose 19% year over year while Google text-ad CPCs rose just 1%. Amazon DSP spend growth accelerated from 41% in Q1 to 67% in Q2. YouTube’s total spend growth cooled from 20% to 15% — even as the TV-screen slice of YouTube buying surged 45%. And Amazon moved Prime Day from July to June, which quietly reshaped every Amazon comp in the quarter.

This analysis puts the Q1 and Q2 2026 numbers side by side — something none of the report’s trade coverage does — separates price-led growth from volume-led growth channel by channel, and translates the shifts into concrete H2 2026 budget moves. Static per-channel CPC and CVR references live in our benchmark library; this post is about where the money moved this quarter and why.

Tinuiti published its Q2 2026 Digital Ads Benchmark Report on or around July 16, 2026, under a title that captures the quarter’s framing: Amazon advertising growth outpaced every other platform even as elevated gas prices and economic uncertainty failed to “rock the boat.” The dataset is anonymized performance data from advertising programs Tinuiti manages — more than $4 billion in annual digital ad spend. That makes it one of the largest agency-side benchmark panels published quarterly, with the usual caveat: it reflects Tinuiti’s client mix, not a census of the market.

Two structural notes shape how every number below should be read. First, Amazon moved Prime Day from its typical July slot up to June 2026, pulling a tentpole retail event — and the media spend around it — from Q3 into Q2. Amazon’s quarter-over-quarter acceleration is real, but part of it is calendar, not just momentum. Second, the report’s macro backdrop included gas-price pressure tied to the Iran conflict, which Tinuiti frames as a headwind the digital ad platforms mostly absorbed without slowing.

The report itself is quarter-in-isolation. The trade coverage — MediaPost and The Measure of Things, both on July 16 — is also quarter-in-isolation. What follows adds the piece nobody published: the Q1 2026 baseline next to the Q2 2026 print, so acceleration and deceleration become visible channel by channel.

The sharpest divergence in the report is a pricing story most coverage reports as two separate facts. Microsoft Advertising paid-search spend rose 7% year over year in Q2 2026 — but Microsoft CPCs rose 19% over the same period, up from weak CPC growth in the year-ago quarter. Do the arithmetic and the picture inverts: advertisers on Microsoft paid substantially more per click while buying meaningfully fewer clicks. That is what price discovery looks like when demand outruns inventory.

Google’s text-search auction looks nothing like that. Google Search text-ad spend grew roughly 14% YoY while text-ad CPCs rose just 1% — spend growth carried almost entirely by volume, with pricing essentially flat. Google Shopping spend rose 18% YoY with CPCs continuing to flatline, a dynamic the report ties directly to Amazon’s ongoing absence from US Shopping auctions (more on that in section 04).

Our read: the Microsoft CPC surge is the quarter’s cleanest signal that budget diversification away from Google has reached the point of repricing the alternative. Search Engine Land’s ongoing Tinuiti coverage shows Microsoft spend growth has been a multi-quarter trend rather than a blip — and when a smaller auction absorbs sustained new demand, clicks get expensive fast. For advertisers, Microsoft is no longer automatically the “cheap Google” — every incremental dollar there needs a CPC-adjusted business case. For the static per-industry picture on Google — CPC, CTR, and conversion-rate baselines by vertical — see our Google Ads benchmarks reference; this quarter’s trend data tells you the direction, that reference tells you the level.

Amazon is the report’s headline for a reason: all four of its major ad products accelerated simultaneously. Sponsored Products spend rose 38% YoY — nearly double the 21% growth Tinuiti recorded in Q1. Sponsored Brands jumped from 3% YoY growth in Q1 to 20% in Q2. Amazon DSP accelerated from 41% to 67%. And Prime Video ads grew 48% YoY, driven by Prime Day media buys.

The June Prime Day shift is doing some of this work. With the event pulled forward from July, spend that would historically land in Q3 comps landed in Q2 — flattering every Amazon growth rate in this report. That does not make the momentum fake; DSP was already growing 41% in Q1, its fastest rate in nearly five years, before any Prime Day effect. But it does mean H2 planners should expect Amazon’s Q3 2026 comps to look softer than trend, for the same calendar reason Q2 looked hotter.

A separate Tinuiti publication — its 2026 Amazon Prime Day Study, distinct from the benchmark report — reports Prime Week ad spend across Amazon Search and DSP up 19% YoY, propelled by a 59% DSP surge that made up 35% of Prime Week spend. We could only corroborate those figures via search snippets at press time, so treat them as directional color rather than load-bearing data.

One adjacent data point underlines how much gravity Amazon DSP is generating beyond Amazon’s own properties: on the same day the benchmark coverage ran, Triton Digital announced it had integrated Amazon DSP as a demand-side partner for its programmatic audio marketplace. That announcement is a separate news item — not part of the Tinuiti report — but its framing captures why third-party supply keeps plugging in:

The report contains a two-fact paradox that almost no coverage connects. Fact one: Amazon’s US Google Shopping impression share sits at 0% against the median retailer — it is effectively absent from the auction, and the report specifically notes Amazon did not buy Google Shopping media to promote Prime Day listings in Q2. Fact two: Google Shopping spend still grew 18% YoY, with CPCs continuing to flatline.

Connect them and the causal story emerges. Amazon’s withdrawal removed the auction’s single largest bidder, which suppressed Shopping CPC inflation — and other retailers responded exactly the way economics predicts: they bought the newly affordable impressions. Shopping spend growth at flat pricing means the 18% is nearly all volume — retailers taking share of voice that Amazon vacated, at prices Amazon’s absence made possible.

Meanwhile the demand Amazon withheld from Google’s auction shows up on the other side of the ledger — in its own Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, and DSP lines, all accelerating. Amazon simultaneously deflates its rival’s auction and concentrates traffic monetization inside its own stack. For non-Amazon retailers, this is a genuine window: cheap Shopping clicks exist precisely because the biggest competitor left. Windows like this close without notice — if Amazon re-enters the auction, Shopping CPCs reprice upward and the arbitrage evaporates.

YouTube is the number most likely to be misquoted out of this report, because two very different growth figures sit near each other in the source data. Total YouTube ad-inventory spend grew 15% YoY in Q2 2026 — a deceleration from 20% growth in the same quarter a year ago. Separately, spend on YouTube campaigns viewed on TV screens rose 45% YoY. The 45% is a subset, not the total: TV- screen viewing accounted for 75% of YouTube video-campaign spend in the quarter.

The composition detail is where the actual strategy signal lives. Skippable in-stream remained the largest YouTube format at 62% of video spend. Shorts held roughly flat at 17% of spend. And the screen split is now stark: TV screens took 60% of Shorts spend versus 79% of spend on other YouTube video formats. Pricing moved in advertisers’ favor — impressions grew 19% YoY while average CPMs fell 3% — meaning YouTube’s 15% spend growth was entirely volume-led, bought at slightly cheaper unit prices.

The honest synthesis: YouTube-the-platform is decelerating while YouTube-the-TV-channel is booming inside it. Advertisers treating YouTube as a CTV buy are the growth; advertisers treating it as a mobile pre-roll line are the deceleration. Baseline CPV and CPM levels by industry are in our YouTube advertising benchmarks reference — read this quarter’s trend on top of those levels.

Meta’s Q2 print looks unremarkable until you decompose it. Facebook spend rose 7% YoY — a rebound from a relatively weak start to the year — but the growth was entirely price: CPMs rose 13% while impressions fell 5%. Instagram rose 17% YoY on the opposite mechanics — flat CPMs, with growth driven by strong impression growth from Reels, which now account for 35% of all Instagram ad impressions.

Off-YouTube streaming quietly reaccelerated: spend on Prime Video, Netflix, and HBO Max inventory rose 14% YoY, up from 6% growth in Q1, while streaming CPMs fell 2% as competitive pressure among the platforms held pricing in check. More streaming supply chasing ad budgets is deflationary for CTV pricing broadly — a rare corner of the market where the auction is getting cheaper as it grows. For display and programmatic baselines to layer under these trends, our display advertising benchmarks and Facebook Ads CPC and CPM benchmarks carry the per-industry levels.

One notable absence: the Q2 2026 report’s free preview teases TikTok’s resurgence qualitatively but publishes no TikTok, Pinterest, or Snapchat growth figures we could verify. We have deliberately not backfilled those platforms with last year’s numbers — any Q2 2026 percentage you see attributed to them elsewhere deserves a source check.

Each quarterly report — and each article covering it — presents its quarter in isolation. Putting Tinuiti’s Q1 2026 prints (via Marketing Brew’s April 23 coverage) next to the Q2 2026 prints (MediaPost and The Measure of Things, July 16) surfaces the real story: which channels are heating up versus cooling. The delta column is our calculation — Q2 growth rate minus Q1 growth rate, in percentage points. Channels without a corroborated Q1 2026 figure (Microsoft, Facebook, Instagram, Prime Video) are excluded rather than estimated.

The pattern is not subtle. Every Amazon line accelerated by 17 points or more. Both Google lines held exactly steady. YouTube — the one channel that decelerated — lost five points of growth. The market is not growing evenly and lifting all boats; it is rotating, and the rotation has a direction. Even discounting Amazon’s delta for the Prime Day calendar shift, a three-product simultaneous acceleration of this size is a demand-side verdict on where retail-adjacent budgets believe conversions live.

Spend growth alone hides the question that matters for bidding strategy: did advertisers buy more, or just pay more? Where Tinuiti reports both a spend figure and a price metric (CPC or CPM), the gap between them approximates volume growth. The volume column below is our derivation — spend growth minus price growth, a first-order approximation — except where Tinuiti reported the volume metric directly (YouTube impressions +19%, Facebook impressions −5%), in which case the reported figure is shown.

Two channels stand out as price-led: Microsoft Search and Facebook. Both grew spend while delivering less volume — which means advertisers on those channels need conversion-rate or conversion-value gains just to hold ROI flat. Everywhere else, Q2 growth bought real incremental reach. That decomposition, not the headline spend figures, is what should drive H2 bid strategy — and it is the lens the raw coverage never applies.

Benchmark reports earn their keep only when they change an allocation decision. Four moves follow directly from this quarter’s data — each conditional on your channel mix, none of them a blanket reallocation.

Looking one quarter ahead: if the rotation holds, expect Q3 2026 to print softer Amazon comps (the Prime Day pull-forward reversing out), continued Microsoft CPC pressure as diversification budgets keep arriving, and a widening gap between YouTube-as-CTV and YouTube-as-mobile-video. The structural bet — that retail media plus CTV take share from mobile social and text search — has now run in the same direction for at least two consecutive quarters in Tinuiti’s panel. Building a channel mix around that trajectory, and measuring it honestly across platforms, is exactly the work our paid media team does — and pressure-testing the measurement layer underneath it is where our analytics practice starts every engagement.