How Effective Are Social Ads?
Social media ad spending is likely to top $35 billion (16% of all digital ad spending) in 2017, but does it really work? For all the innovation we’ve seen in advertising, we’ve landed in a place where instead of knowing which half doesn’t work, we’re down to 46%. In short, they’re popular, but questionable.
Every ad has at least 4 critical, moving parts: the content, the placement, the network, and the audience. Depending on how these individual parts are adjusted, different results are possible. Of course, fatigue with any of these parts also destroys value.
Common wisdom holds that social offers opportunities to improve on all of these dimensions, but for many that is still proving quite elusive. A new study by CivicScience throws a bit of cold water on the excitement. As eMarketer reports:
An August 2017 study from CivicScience, a next-generation consumer and media analytics company, found that very few US internet users have made a purchase based on ads they saw on social platforms, like Facebook or Snapchat.
Overall, out of the various social networks mentioned, respondents were more likely to buy something based on a Facebook ad they saw compared with other social networks.
But again, social commerce adoption among these respondents was low. For the most part, a large share (45%) reported that they have never purchased anything based on ads they saw from these social media sites. Meanwhile, over a third said they just don’t use social media.
While these results are disappointing, they do point some of the broader opportunity that exists for social ads.
First, networks matter. While every network has a unique audience, it is clear that consumers have become the most comfortable with Facebook’s platform and its stable of features. That time and scale afford Facebook more opportunities to experiment and understand how to deliver the right experience.
Second, with the largest audience, Facebook also gets to rely on a greater sample size for targeting and delivering the right content to the consumer. We can expect that Instagram and other tools in the Facebook ecosystem will see related benefits as identities are linked and best practices deployed.
Third, placement is king and the app with the most surface area is winning. While the more constrained visual-only streams of Instagram and Snapchat are great for consumption, it also makes advertisements more conspicuous.
Lastly, Facebook benefits from a wealth of content types and presentations, affording them a great deal of diversity with content. Also, as Facebook allows for the easy promotion of existing content, it gains the added advantage of humanizing ad content to the audience.
Clearly, dynamic ad content generation coupled with native placement and hyper targeting to a massive audience is definitely a recipe for success in our attention-deficit, ad-blind minds.
How will the competition catch up? How will brands leverage these opportunities? Spraying and praying the same content and message to ever-fragmenting audiences isn’t the solution.
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Gregarious Narain is a serial entrepreneur and product strategist. A reformed designer and developer, he writes on his experiences as a founder, strategist, and father on the regular. Work with him at Before Alpha, connect on LinkedIn, follow on Facebook, or say hi on Twitter.