Marketers have been flocking to Facebook in their droves thanks to a raft of new advertising products being launched by the company.
The social network’s tunnel-vision approach to monetisation might not be sitting well with its user base, but new data from marketing software Kenshoo reveals the strategy is paying off as Facebook ad budgets have increased 81% year on year.
In its quarterly study, the Kenshoo Search and Social Snapshot: Q3 2014, the firm provided more evidence that Facebook is likely laughing all the way to the bank, with revenue from the social network’s ads rising year on year by 162%.
Social growth outpaces search
Kenshoo’s figures for Facebook ads seemingly dwarf the like-for-like stats it has for search. Social clickthrough rates increased 148% year on year, compared to the growth of just 23% that search achieved.
It was a similar story for the previously reported social ad spend figure, which far outstripped search and made its ad spend growth of 19% year on year look meagre in comparison to Facebook’s accomplishments in the same quarter.
Interestingly both search and social have struggled to reach the heady heights of the fourth quarter of 2014 year-on-year spend growth. Each channel nose dived in Q1 2013 and have been on an upward recovery trend since.
Multi-channel usage
Price Glomski, executive vice president of product for advertising agency PMG, argues that search is still a force despite it being a far older channel than social.
“Paid search continues to deliver results as a mature and trusted channel, and utilising it as a source of intent data to inform social advertising has emerged as a proven best practice for campaign optimisation.
“Similarly, social advertising has shown a positive impact on paid search when utilised in tandem and we’re continuing to invest heavily in social on its own merits as a strong performance marketing channel,” he said.
Check out more of Kenshoo’s stats in the below infographic.
