Thursday 19 July 2012

Facebook's mobile ads have 4x the click rate of Twitter's mobile ads

Update - 23rd July - TBG Digital have corrected the research - Twitter's mobile ads have higher click throughs than Facebook's
"Facebook yesterday saw a decline in share price on a report of falling user numbers in key markets like the U.S. and Europe, but in a sign of how it is firming up its business, Facebook is also making significantly more money and getting more sticky with its advertising, on the back of newer, more targeted ad formats like Sponsored Stores and mobile ads. The latest quarterly report from ad agency TBG Digital, out today, indicates that cost per thousand impressions (CPMs) on ads on the social network rose by 58 percent compared to the same period last year, with overall engagement also up by 11 percent, a reversal of the decline seen last quarter. And among Facebook’s newer units that target people more directly, Sponsored Stories saw 53 percent more engagement than standard ads, and mobile ads had four times the engagement of Twitter ads, says TBG.
Pointedly, TBG says that there is growing acceptance from brands and other advertisers of Facebook’s wider business model, blending more traditional digital advertising metrics with new metrics like social engagement to determine the value of paying to be on a platform like Facebook’s. “Our clients, upon our advice, are now willing to pay more for quality clicks and fans. Focus is shifting toward measurable engagement and the difference Social Media connections are making to their bottom line,” the analysts write.
The report takes into account 406 billion impressions, covering 190 countries and 276 clients, and as with past reports has been vetted by the Cambridge University Psychometrics Centre.
The 58 percent rise in CPMs looks to be part of a growing trend: Last quarter, the CPM was 41 percent compared to a year ago; the January report indicated that it was 23 percent up. Germany, it says, had the largest increase in CPMs, up by 31 percent, while the U.S. was second-highest at 25 percent. The UK saw only a 7 percent rise.
[...]
Breaking out the different categories of ad formats further, TBG notes that “desktop” ads — those that appear in the right column of the Facebook page, and news feed ads are performing significantly worse than mobile ads. Desktop had CTRs of 0.083 percent; with desktop news feed ads with CTRs of 0.588 percent. In contrast, mobile ads, which appear in a users’ news feed, were at 1.140 percent. TBG also took the step of comparing this to Twitter ad engagement, which it charted in a separate, recent study. In 24 million Twitter impressions the average CTR on its ads (across mobile and desktop) was 0.266 percent — four times lower than mobile ads on Facebook.
It should be noted, though, that so far Twitter doesn’t appear to have made much use of targeting those ads to specific users: I am just as likely to see an ad about a cruise as I am a new tablet right now, regardless of what I’m doing or who I follow on the site."
Source:  Techcrunch, 18th July 2012
Full report here
Update - 23rd July - TBG Digital have corrected the research - Twitter's mobile ads have higher click throughs than Facebook's

No comments: