Sahil Jain is the CEO and co-founder of AdStage which is an all-in-one advertising platform which assists marketers manage, automate, and report the ad campaigns that they are running across various search and social networks through an universal data API.
At AdStage they had analyzed 107+ million clicks across 40 different countries from various sources including Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. The advertiser types were broken down by whether they were in-house or agency and whether they were B2B, B2C, or both. 57% of the clicks were generated from in-house advertisers and 43% were driven by agency advertisers. B2B accounted for 47%, B2C for 22%, and 31% of them being classified as both.
Facebook is clearly one of the most popular social media platforms and for that reason there is a remarkable opportunity for businesses to advertise through paid media. The growing issue is that because so many industries are pushing ads, Facebook is starting to reach their maximum ad load. David Wehner, Facebook CFO was quoted saying, “We anticipate ad load on Facebook will continue to grow modestly over the next 12 months and then will be a less significant factor driving revenue growth after mid-2017.”
It was reported that 73% of marketers are investing a majority of their social budget towards Facebook. For that reason, Facebook has been pushing their audience base by purchasing Instagram and other platforms to satisfy the supply and demand model.
LinkedIn is often thought of a social platform to connect individuals with others in their industry and for many the prospect of finding a new job to assist them in progressing. It may be for that reason that 43% of advertisers are not spending on LinkedIn. The impressions dropped in the second quarter of 2017 which caused Cost per Thousand Impressions (CPM) to increase by 44%. Interestingly enough, in smaller population countries, such as Australia, Canada, and United Kingdom there was a higher CPM due to competitiveness of a smaller quantity.
There were some interesting points to ponder with this data including if LinkedIn’s Inventory had Maxed Out with the knowledge that LinkedIn ad impressions dropped by 5% while the spend increased by 10% in the second quarter of 2017.
Twitter, like LinkedIn, is social media platform that is being under-utilized when it comes to investing in paid media advertising. It was reported that 49% of advertisers were new to spending on Twitter. The Costs per Thousand Impressions did increase by 40% in the second quarter of 2017. Contrary to LinkedIn, there are higher CPMs in the United Kingdom and the United States when comparing to Australia and Canada. With this information, the Cost Per Click (CPC) did increase as well by 18% in the second quarter of 2017 while its Click Through Rate (CTR) remained rather consistent.
Conclusions
There were a couple of take-aways with the data that was presented:
- Facebook is the Belle of the Ball.
- The CPMs are increasing as inventory tightens
Of the three social media platforms that were studied, every single one of their Costs Per Impression increased in the second quarter of 2017 when compared to the first quarter of 2017. Facebook increased by 76%. Twitter increased by 11% and LinkedIn increased by 18%.