Do you advertise on Facebook? It’s good isn’t it? After all, everyone is on Facebook; well, certainly everyone that I know is on there. If you want exposure for your product, where better to advertise than a place where everybody is, all of the time? For those of you that are placing adverts on the social network, or are considering doing so – today I bring forth some bad news, with a little added good news. If however, you are a Mark Zuckerberg employee and you are reading today’s blog unaware of the news – for you it is a good day.
The news is… Facebook advertising rates have shot up by 41 per cent in the last year. That’s not all; click-through rates have also decreased – both bad statements for advertisers.
According to Simon Mansell, the chief executive at TBG Digital, the company who compiled the advertising rate figures, and incidentally one of the social network’s biggest spenders, “”Facebook has seen an increase in pricing at the same time it has grown the number of ads per page to seven, which you would naturally expect to actually deflate prices.” Very true, I counted seven ads just this morning!
TBG Digital’s study found that advertisers have been asked to pay 15% more per thousand views than at this time last year and that the cost of acquiring a fan of your brand has risen, on average, by 43% globally in the last year. In the UK, however, the increase is not in keeping with the global average, and the increase per fan is actually 77%! This comes at a time when click-through rates are down by 6% in the first quarter of this year.
Of course, all of this extra revenue is good news for Facebook’s planned $100 billion stock-market flotation as advertising accounts for 85% of overall revenue. However, if prices continue to increase, marketers are going to be priced out of advertising on the site, especially when click-through rates are not guaranteed. Okay, so the price hike won’t matter much to mega corporations such as Budweiser and McDonalds, but the thousands of smaller companies may begin to look elsewhere, like Google for instance.
Don’t be too gloomy though, it’s not all bad news for UK marketers. The study has revealed that the UK has overtaken Canada to become the second most lucrative market for social network advertising behind the United States.
Rise of the Social Reader
With ad click-through rates down, if you really want to get noticed on Facebook, you might want to ditch the snazzy advertisements, create yourself a news website and advertise on there! Facebook users clicking on news stories have trebled in just three months – an increase of 196%! Social reader technology posts updates to the news feeds of logged in users visiting external “partner” news sites. These partners include, Yahoo, The Independent and the Guardian.
At the moment the social reader is free to news sites, although I wouldn’t expect it to be too long before a way is found to make money from it.
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