Advertisers continue to spend more on Facebook

Catherine Chappell, James Palmer and Neil Weaver, discuss Facebook's growing popularity.

With more than 2.3 billion active users [1], and a better global penetration than any other paid social platform [2], it’s no wonder that advertisers are continuing to spend more on Facebook [3]. With an ever-growing family of apps, Facebook continues to respond to user needs and wants, bringing it closer to becoming a fully integrated one-stop shop for digital media consumption. Adding the capability to target the consumer based on a vast range of off-Facebook activity means that a full-funnel strategy can be achieved within a single engine.  

Whilst Google encounters increased competition from the shopping capabilities of Amazon [4], Facebook has managed to stay ahead of competitors, with the recent launch of Instagram shopping which has streamlined the path to purchase through the platform. This release was due to the response from consumers with increased interest in social as a shopping channel – i.e. those turning to influencers to find new products and then turning to brand pages for further information.

This is certainly a trend we are starting to see from our clients. We no longer just receive TVC / branded social assets; we receive influencer content to use in advertising, adding a layer of authenticity and combining product and purpose.

Facebook also has a multitude of placements available to advertisers, which has brought strong results through the success of the Story format [5]. Through placement optimisation, advertisers can give the Facebook algorithm the power to decide where to talk to the consumer i.e. right place, right time, bringing increased relevance and efficiency

A key factor in Facebook’s growing dominance is the uniquely high quality of the site traffic it generates. Beyond simply optimising for clicks, Facebook’s Pixel software can laser-focus on audience members most likely to take specific on-site actions. For any goal – from purchase completions to app downloads – Facebook can aggressively optimise to drive down cost per action for that event.

This optimisation can be supercharged by combination with ‘Lookalikes’ – audiences algorithmically tuned to discover users with the greatest similarity to your existing customers.

Advertisers are also becoming more interested in attribution and scalability [6], leading Facebook to move on from its traditional attribution tools and invest in its own multi-touch attribution capability [7]. This not only allows advertisers to understand incrementality on a global scale, but also provides a platform for smaller advertisers to measure the effectiveness of their campaigns.  

By taking the guesswork out of targeting and optimisation, Facebook’s tools offer a degree of relevancy and efficiency unparalleled by any of its competitors. Advertisers can even test the effectiveness of different setups and marketing approaches using Facebook’s testing tools, and measure their results using brand or conversion lift studies in platform without the need for third-party tracking.

space and hope this will lead to increased confidence moving forwards.

1. https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly-active-facebook-users-worldwide/

2. https://www.smartinsights.com/social-media-marketing/social-media-strategy/new-global-social-media-research/

3. https://marketingland.com/as-advertisers-pull-back-on-facebook-instagrams-ad-spend-growth-rate-is-booming-246265

4. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/08/google-search-losing-some-adverrtising-business-to-amazon-ad-sources.html

5. https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/24/facebook-earnings-q1-2019/

6. https://www.emarketer.com/content/five-charts-the-state-of-attribution

7. https://www.facebook.com/business/measurement/attribution

8. https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/24/facebook-earnings-q1-2019/