Facebook Ad Spend Rises as Marketers Gain Further Insight into Cross-Channel Campaigns

Facebook ad spend saw a considerable increase in 2014 as marketers gained further understanding of the network’s tools for cross-channel campaigns, reports predictive marketing software Kenshoo.

Facebook ad spend climbed 33% year on year and in the final quarter of 2014, click-through rates on the network rose by 430% compared to readings in 2013. This also resulted in an increase of 70% when comparing click throughs in Q4 2014 with those from the previous quarter.

Justin Thorne, Kenshoo’s Marketing Director for EMEA, said this was a result of marketers getting better acquainted with Facebook’s ad formats and targeting capabilities to create successful campaigns.

“With continued improvement in ad formats and more sophisticated campaign targeting, and bidding, marketers have eliminated wasteful impressions, showing more relevant ads to the customer segments most likely to convert,” he said.

“In social advertising in particular, there has been a steep learning curve as marketers have begun to better understand the nuances of the various Facebook ad formats and targeting capabilities, hence the very significant improvements in their campaign results.”

Search follows suit

The research, Kenshoo Search and Social Snapshot: Q4 2014, highlights the strong performance of digital marketing during the final quarter of last year and indicates that marketers are gaining stellar results from both search and social campaigns.

Spend on paid search advertising increased 15% year on year in Q4, with clicks rising 14% quarter on quarter. These are being earned from fewer search impressions, which decreased 11% between Q4 2014 and Q3 2014.

The results are based on five quarters of performance data from more than 6,000 Kenshoo advertiser and agency profiles and 51 countries, spanning the Facebook, Google, Yahoo!, Yahoo! Japan, Bing and Baidu ad networks.

Thorne adds that as marketers become more familiar with search and social, spend will continue to rise.

“We’re seeing among our clients that marketers are becoming much more aware of the complementary nature of search and social, as well as the role of mobile in reaching target audiences. For example they are embracing new techniques, such as applying search intent data to social campaigns to generate better overall results,” he concluded.