The “new normal” that was brought to us during the April COVID-19 peak forced everyone to quickly go to battle mode against the unexpected challenges and adjust our lives accordingly. As May is coming to end, the situation is getting better and businesses are starting to get back to their feet.

Advertisement business also felt the pandemic impact and marketers across all industries were also pushed to their limits to invent new ways to push their ads in this unusual time when a whole new way of how we search and when we search the internet became standard. Many are still adjusting to these rapid changes in our industry, but the data does look promising. As of early May, PPC campaigns appear to be recovering from the shock of COVID-19.

While many advertisers still are not receiving the same results that they had in March, most are beginning to show some improvement. Specifically, starting the late of April, paid search conversions rebounded to about 89% of their pre-COVID levels. Advertisers on Bing saw less of a drop initially but saw similar recovery in late April.

Our internet usage has skyrocketed, as we work, learn, and stay connected at home more. According to the researches, people are consuming 70% more content online. Advertisers are finding a quickly growing audience with Google Display ads and YouTube, even if most of that time is spent off the SERP.

COVID-19 has limited traditional retail and made ecommerce essential for most people. But small businesses online advertising have done particularly good during April, as their largest competitors like Walmart and Amazon have struggled to manage the high number of orders and have pulled most of their ads from Google. Facebook shared its Q1 2020 performance and reported healthy growth made by increased ad sales despite the pandemic. Facebook noted that as a result of COVID-19, the costs of Facebook ads took a decline in the last three weeks of March and have remained low since.

At the same time, people started to use social media a lot more to stay in contact with their families and friends. People began to use WhatsApp, Facebook, Facebook Messenger, and Instagram, helping Facebook grow its active user base to a new record of 2.6 billion monthly active users.

While it may be a long road back to normal, there’s been new hope for advertisers that are finding more customers online than they were in the early days of this crisis.