NEW ZEALAND BUSINESS NEWS
Empowering Kiwi Businesses
New Zealand’s advertising market brought in $4.115 billion in the 12 months to 31 December 2025, according to the Advertising Standards Authority’s 2025 Advertising Turnover Report, up from a revised $3.816 billion in 2024. Most of that money now goes to digital channels, and within digital, one format takes far more than any other.
IAB New Zealand’s full-year figures show digital advertising revenue grew 12 per cent to $2.967 billion in 2025. Search accounted for $1.44 billion of that, up 12 per cent, and was close to half the digital total.
Video was the fastest-growing format, up 27 per cent to $653.8 million. Even so, businesses still spend on search when a customer is actively looking for a product or service. That is the practical difference between the two formats: video buys attention, while search buys a customer who is already partway to a decision.
The quarterly numbers point the same way. IAB New Zealand reports the market every three months, and the fourth quarter of 2025 alone brought in $813.8 million, up 12 per cent on the same quarter a year earlier. On those figures, search is unlikely to lose its lead among digital formats any time soon.
Spending at that scale raises the cost of paid listings. The more advertisers bid on the same terms, the more each click costs, and businesses that rely on ads alone pay for every visit. When the campaign stops, so do the visits.
That has put search engine optimisation on the agenda of smaller businesses that will never buy a share of that $1.44 billion but still need to be found for a handful of local search terms. The paid spend only buys the listings at the top of the page. The organic results underneath are contested just as hard, which is why more businesses now bring in an SEO agency alongside their paid campaigns: an organic ranking keeps bringing visits after an ad campaign is switched off.
For a small operator, the work is practical, not technical. It starts with a page for each service the business offers, so that a search for a specific job lands on a page that answers it. It continues with an accurate, up-to-date Google Business Profile, because that is what a local customer sees before they ever reach the website. Reviews from recent customers do the rest of the persuading.
None of that requires a budget to compete with national advertisers. It requires the business to be findable for the terms its own customers actually type, in the area it actually serves. The alternative, buying every visit through paid search, gets more expensive as more advertisers bid on the same words.
The direction of travel is clear from the annual and quarterly figures. Digital advertising grew 12 per cent over the year, search grew 12 per cent, and video grew 27 per cent. Money is still flowing into the channel, so competition for the top of the results page, paid and organic, is set to get harder, not easier.
For businesses weighing where to put their marketing spend, the split between paid and organic matters most. Paid search delivers visitors while the budget lasts. An organic ranking, built once and maintained, keeps delivering them afterwards.
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