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Page 1: Qdib optimising-paid-media-september-2013

Market Data / Supplier Selection / Event Presentations / User Experience Benchmarking / Best Practice / Template Files / Trends & Innovation

Quarterly Digital Intelligence Briefing: Optimising Paid Media

in association with Adobe

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Quarterly Digital Intelligence Briefing: Optimising Paid Media in association with Adobe

Econsultancy London

4th Floor, Farringdon Point

29-35 Farringdon Road

London EC1M 3JF

United Kingdom

Telephone:

+44 207 269 1450

http://econsultancy.com

[email protected]

Econsultancy New York

350 7th Avenue, Suite 307

New York, NY 10001

United States

Telephone:

+1 212 971 0630

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be

reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means,

electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording

or any information storage and retrieval system, without

prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Copyright © Econsultancy.com Ltd 2013

Published September 2013

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and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. Copyright © Econsultancy.com Ltd 2013

Contents

1. Foreword by Adobe .......................................................... 4

2. Media optimisation driven by business goals still just an aspiration for most ...................................................... 5

3. Marketers strive to overcome challenges of resourcing and disparate ownership ................................................. 8

4. Analytics integration and attribution are key building blocks .............................................................................. 11

5. Understanding the path-to-purchase and customer journey in a mobile world .............................................. 13

6. Scale, skill and science: three key requirements for optimisation success ...................................................... 15

7. How quantification of benefits can help drive budgets 18

8. Companies still missing out on advantages of real-time bidding ................................................................... 21

9. Improved proposition for advertisers helps Facebook dominate social budgets ................................................ 23

10. Appendix ........................................................................ 26

10.1. Use of paid-for media ................................................................ 26

10.2. Respondent profiles .................................................................. 27

10.2.1. Geography .............................................................................. 28

10.2.2. Business sector ....................................................................... 29

10.2.3. Job role ................................................................................... 30

10.2.4. Job function ........................................................................... 31

10.2.5. Size of company by revenue ................................................... 32

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1. Foreword by Adobe This latest Quarterly Digital Intelligence Briefing explores the topic of media optimisation, and

how companies can ensure the most effective use of their budgets in helping them to meet their

business goals.

It is clear from this research that many advertisers don’t have the visibility they require across

different channels to ensure that they have an optimal media mix. Only a fifth of companies

responding to this Econsultancy business survey say they are effectively optimising their media,

and a similarly small proportion say they have a single view of campaign performance across

channels.

With this being such a widespread challenge, we are proud of the way Adobe Media Optimizer can

now enable our clients to gain visibility of performance across media channels, helping to explode

the myth that half of ad spend is wasted.

We now offer our clients a complete picture of how campaigns are performing across search,

social and display, providing the first unified ad management system for digital marketing

programmes across these three types of media.

The top three benefits of media optimisation outlined in the report are reduced cost per

acquisition, reduced media costs and more sales. Tellingly, those companies who are able to

quantify improvements from media optimisation are seeing, on average, an uplift of 28% in

performance.

For those already sold on the benefits of media optimisation, our own technology can also enable

companies to predict which scenarios will shift customers from awareness to purchase before any

marketing budget has been spent.

By running simulations, our spend recommendation models can advise you about the amount and

proportions of budget you should be investing in each channel to reach specified revenue goals,

and even what degree of confidence you should have in these forecasts.

Our platform also helps you to set up display campaigns to re-target those who have shown an

interest in your products or services but haven’t converted.

Asked what single feature they would like to add to their media optimisation technology, we were

particularly interested to see that marketers have better integration with web analytics at the top

of their wish list.

The integration of Adobe Media Optimizer with our Adobe Analytics platform, also part of the

Adobe Marketing Cloud, means that this is something that our customers are already benefiting

from.

Mark Phibbs

VP EMEA, Adobe

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2. Media optimisation driven by business

goals still just an aspiration for most A key finding of this research is that most companies have a great opportunity to improve their

business performance by taking a more integrated approach to managing their digital media mix.

It is clear from this Econsultancy survey of more than 600 businesses that effective media

optimisation across digital channels is being undertaken by only a minority of companies.

As the chart below shows, only a fifth of companies (21%) say their media optimisation is

‘effective’, while the majority (57%) say they carry out only ‘limited’ optimisation across different

digital media channels.

The remaining fifth (22%) rate themselves as laggards in this respect, admitting that there is ‘no

optimisation’.

The perspective of agencies surveyed as part of this report tells a similar story, with almost two

thirds of supply-side respondents rating their clients’ level of media optimisation as only limited.

Figure 1: To what extent do you or your agency (or your clients) optimise media buying across different digital channels?

In an increasingly complex media landscape with fast-changing consumer buying patterns, the

reality for businesses is that they cannot afford to eschew a joined-up and optimised approach to

digital media.

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A key requirement for effective optimisation is to ensure that the media mix is always driven by

business goals, rather than tactical objectives within a silo which may improve the performance of

a particular channel, but not necessarily contribute to collective success.

As an example which illustrates the need for an

integrated approach, paid search has proved to be a

phenomenally effective performance channel in recent

times but the contribution of other types of media in

supporting this success should not be overlooked.

Seen in isolation, the value of display might be

understated if it is not seen as part of a bigger picture

defined by overall uplift (both revenue and branding –

related) and cost.

One of the issues companies face is the ‘use of different

success metrics by channel’, with 69% of responding

companies pointing to this as a barrier to optimisation

of media activity (see Figure 6).

That said, it is encouraging that more than two thirds

of companies (69%) agree that their media mix is driven by business goals, compared to only 7%

who disagree (Figure 2).

So why are many companies only achieving

limited media optimisation, despite an

appreciation that the mix should be determined

by business imperatives?

Figure 3 highlights a major problem faced by

organisations trying to keep the bigger picture in

mind.

Only 19% of companies agree that they have a ‘single

view of campaign performance across search, social

and display’, a figure dwarfed by the 56% of

companies who disagree with this statement.

The chart on the next page (Figure 4) shows the main business objectives associated with paid search, social advertising and online display. The differences between channels are most obvious in the case of ‘direct online sales’ which is significantly more likely to be the principal objective for paid search than for display and social advertising. The reverse is true for branding.

Figure 2: ‘Our media mix is driven by business goals’

Figure 3: ‘We have a single view of campaign performance across

search, social and display’

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Figure 4: What is your main business objective for the following media?

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3. Marketers strive to overcome challenges

of resourcing and disparate ownership While integrated marketing activity is about more than just advertising, the focus of this report is

paid-for digital media, namely paid search, display advertising and social advertising.

For many companies, the buying of these media has been owned and managed by different parts

of the business, with responsibility for different channels also split across in-house and agency

teams.

The chart below shows who is responsible for each paid-for media channel across our sample of

responding businesses, with display advertising the most likely to be managed exclusively by an

agency and social advertising the least likely to be outsourced.

Figure 5: Do you buy the following media in-house or are they outsourced to an agency?

The need to rely on agencies is a reality for many companies where they don’t have the in-house

bandwidth and expertise to manage channels themselves.

Asked about obstacles to effective media optimisation, lack of resources emerged as the most

significant obstacle, with 43% of responding companies citing this as a ‘major’ barrier and a

further 36% pointing to this as a ‘minor’ barrier.

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Figure 6: What is preventing you from optimising your media activity as effectively as you would like?

While sometimes unavoidable for practical reasons, disparate ownership of media can present

obvious problems in trying to adopt a unified approach and gaining a single view of campaign

performance, especially when there is a lack of communication between different departments

and teams.

It is clear that companies need to overcome the technological and people-related challenges born

out of fragmented media buying, both through integrated technology platforms and shared

business metrics.

As a good example, there is an obvious synergy from having a joined-up approach to buying of

display advertising and social ads within platforms such as Facebook which are really a sub-set of

display advertising.

Encouragingly, Figure 7 below shows that almost two thirds (64%) of respondents say that the

same person is responsible for buying across these media, while for a fifth of businesses (20%)

different people within the same team or agency oversee both these activities.

But for 16% of companies ownership resides within different internal teams or agencies which can

make it extremely difficult to reap the benefits of an integrated approach.

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Figure 7: Are social ads typically bought by the person responsible for display advertising?

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4. Analytics integration and attribution are

key building blocks As Figure 6 in the previous section showed, disparate data sources emerged as the second most

commonly cited barrier to effective media optimisation (after lack of resources), with around a

third (34%) saying this is a ‘major’ barrier.

In a world of ‘big data’ hype, companies could be doing a lot more to be using the data already at

their fingertips. Bigger is not always better or more efficient: some invest in the most complex

platform that can ingest large volumes of data and attempt to make sense of it all, but barely

manage to scratch the surface in the process, with no direct impact on their business.

As marketers are trying to get their head around what data they have access to and how all this

information can be translated into something they can action, integration emerges as one of the

significant issues that are hindering progress.

When asked what feature they would add to their media optimisation technology if they could,

over a third (37%) of marketers put ‘better integration with web analytics’ at the top of their wish

list, significantly more than for the next most sought after feature (‘predictive forecasting’).

Figure 8: If you could add one feature to your media optimisation technology right now, what would it be?

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While most of the features included in Figure 8 may feel somewhat advanced or out of reach for

many organisations, integration with analytics is the low hanging fruit that can have a positive

effect on media optimisation.

Attribution is another related area where advertisers really should be exploiting the possibilities

afforded by technology to scratch beneath the surface to gain a more nuanced perspective on what

is really driving performance.

As the chart below shows, around two-thirds of organisations aren’t remotely ready to focus on

media optimisation because they’ve yet to do any marketing attribution beyond the basics of ‘last

click’.

Figure 9: How would you describe your own (or your clients’) marketing attribution across paid-for digital media?

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5. Understanding the path-to-purchase

and customer journey in a mobile world Figure 10 below shows whether respondents agree with a number of statements relating to media

optimisation sophistication.

When we look at capabilities at this aggregated level, there’s really only one thing that most

companies are doing; mapping their media mix to business goals. The issue for many, though, is

that the right media mix for given business goals depends on a deep understanding of the

customer journey. Based on the responses in Figure 10, it appears that there’s a significant

knowledge gap that needs to be addressed.

Only 27% of our sample see their organisation as having a media mix that reflects the path to

purchase, and the problem isn’t desire, it’s knowledge. Customer journey analysis and

attribution/mix modelling are hard work, and even though technologies are here to help, most

organisations haven’t done the work to understand the customer journey and how it relates to

their disparate channels.

This is also evident from Figure 9 in the previous section which showed the low level of take-up

for anything more than basic, last-click attribution.

Figure 10: In the context of media optimisation, please indicate whether you agree or disagree with the following statements.

It is clear for all of us to see as consumers that the customer journey is changing fast. Mobile

devices only account for a small fraction of total retail, but already influence a significant

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percentage of store sales (Econsultancy estimates roughly 7% in the US for example). For some

demographics and sectors, the number is already far higher. Whatever the number for a

particular organisation, it’s rising quickly, adding a new wrinkle to the customer journey and

therefore to the media mixing process.

Another consideration with the rise of mobile is immediacy. The ability to deliver real-time

optimisation is relatively rare (25%) but important on a number of fronts. In the case of mobile

search, for example, research suggests that the vast majority of mobile-driven purchases take

place within hours of the search itself. The ability to optimise in real time based on factors such as

time of day, query, trends and environmental factors is especially powerful in this context.

It’s especially surprising that only 21% describe

themselves as being able to deliver the right ad at

the right time to the right person. We know that

audience targeting and re-targeting work, so the

question is where the challenge lies in the chain…

with finding the right people, identifying their

intentions or delivering the right ad? With so much

technology focusing on the first two challenges,

marketers should be free to do what they do best,

conceiving the ideas, words and images that tell the

right story.

With so much information coming from so many

points, seeing the big picture is perhaps the greatest

challenge for marketers today. Roughly one in five

report having some capability of getting a single

view of campaign performance across media, but

it’s a number that’s likely to rise as more mid-

market companies invest in platforms that consolidate data inputs. It’s an important step because

it encourages thinking about how channels work together, not simply how they perform on their

own.

Figure 11: ‘We hit the right people with the right media at

the right time’

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6. Scale, skill and science: three key

requirements for optimisation success One aspect dominates optimisation success across display, search and social, namely audience. In

search, audience comes self-selected, but in the other areas, there’s no more effective variable

against which it works to optimise.

In display, the top three techniques chosen by clients are all audience-related. Initial targeting

and re-targeting are closely followed by content placement, a synonym for audience targeting.

Figure 12: What are the most important tactics for optimising display advertising?

For social marketing (Figure 13), audience is again the dominant concern, but creative testing,

landing page optimisation and alignment with other online and offline media are also important..

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Figure 13: What are the most important tactics for optimising social advertising?

The question is not so much whether a given optimisation technique works, because it probably

does at least in some situations. The approaches that floated to the top in our study also tend to be

those most frequently practised. To an extent that is a reflection of effectiveness, but also of

accessibility and familiarity.

Marketing departments that build a culture of testing and optimisation typically build a strong

expertise in baseline skills but, over time, they should evaluate and add new ways of increasing

the yield of their media.

Optimisation tends to live in the extremes, a “nice to have” at some companies and a vital piece of

the puzzle at others. What’s missing at those organisations that aren’t taking full advantage?

Scale

One of the main reasons that marketers don’t invest in optimisation is simply their scale.

Display advertising, at least, is a volume enterprise and its impact on sales is a challenge for

many companies.

But search and social aren’t so easy to dismiss even when they’re on a small scale. In fact,

smaller players in those spaces should be especially interested in learning from and taking

advantage of optimisation. Limited investments in optimisation can vastly improve the yield

of these media, and inform future investment.

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Skill

Optimisation includes a number of different practices, as we see in charts 12, 13 and 14. Some

of these are usually done internally, while others typically reside with an agency or specialist

third party provider. Organisations that excel at optimisation have to build skills in dealing

with both.

The case for internally conducted optimisation is a strong one. Aside from the financial

efficiency that should be achieved, there may be more profound impact in having natural

advocates inside the team for the lessons and improvement of optimisation.

At the same time, highly specialised types of optimisation, like audience targeting and

retargeting, may be best left to experts. Even in these cases, the client benefits from having a

strong working knowledge of how these processes work, both to drive the partner toward

excellence and to be able to internalise not just the topline results of such efforts, but to see

how they fit in the larger context of integrated marketing and their impact on the customer

journey.

Science

Marketing technology is most useful when it improves efficiency or when it enables something

that’s simply not possible to achieve manually. Optimisation is math at a high volume. The

individual calculations aren’t always complex, but as the rows and columns multiply,

manually conducting optimisation gets increasingly difficult and error prone. As a result,

optimisation is an area where technology thrives.

Figure 14: What are the most important tactics for optimising paid search media?

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7. How quantification of benefits can help

drive budgets By a five to one ratio, marketers say that their organisations have benefited from media

optimisation. Opinion is even more lopsided among agencies, which have the advantage of

looking across, and learning from, a variety of companies.

That’s fairly definitive, but leaves open questions that vary by where an organisation sits in terms

of its sophistication in the practice of optimisation.

Figure 15: Has media optimisation benefited your organisation (or your clients)?

Companies that don’t do any media optimisation should take stock of why. What’s lacking from

the list in Section 6 – scale, skills or science? What are the first steps to building a business case?

Is it an issue money or time (hint: they’re the same)? What is the simplest test you can conduct

internally, reliably on a shoestring budget? Perhaps it’s an A/B split or a landing page, but

tangible results, however small, are the most compelling argument going.

Those that conduct optimisation but can’t evaluate the results are in a tough spot. They are

making an investment, but can’t gauge its impact. That’s a recipe for, if not disaster, at least

disappointment. The most frequent blocks are often in digital display and involve technical details

of measurement, so is there a shortcut, such as using third party or identifying a “soft” proxy?

Note: Figure 15 above doesn’t imply that 39% of clients and 25% of agencies are in this position –

many respondents simply aren’t privy to how well optimisation is working.

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The small number that conduct optimisation but don’t see it working (roughly 10%) are either

early in the process, or at a place to re-evaluate their approach. It’s certainly possible that

optimisation in some media might not increase yields enough to warrant continued investment,

but a rigorous and diverse process should produce results significant enough to measure and

spark further testing.

Figure 16: How has media optimisation benefited your organisation / clients?

Organisations that conduct optimisation and know that it’s working just need to ask “what’s

next?” A surprising number of marketers install a set of practices that are the easiest to perform

or associated with their largest media expenses, but don’t go further. Once the evidence is in the

bag, marketers can push the envelope and explore the

economies of third party specialists or internal hires

devoted solely to optimisation.

The reasons for marketers optimising their paid-for

media are highlighted in Figure 16, which shows that

the top three benefits of media optimisation are

reduced cost per acquisition (cited by 58% of

respondents), reduced media costs (55%) and more

sales (52%).

While there’s some overlap in the benefits listed in the chart below, they boil down to the opportunity to generate more revenue at a higher margin. “More sales” is often the result of an increased conversion rate on key pages, and can work in tandem with greater

Figure 17: Are you able to quantify the uplift in your return

on ad spend you've had as a result of media optimisation?

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efficiency (lower spending) on media to result in a lower cost per acquisition.

When it comes to quantifying the uplift in return on ad spend organisations have had as a result of media optimisation, only around a third (35%) are able to do so (Figure 17). Those who are able to quantify the improvement are seeing, on average, a 28% uplift, slightly lower than the level of improvement noted by agencies (32%).

As far as budgets are concerned, just over a quarter (28%) of companies surveyed have dedicated media optimisation budgets, while around a third (37%) use budgets assigned for other things, typically coming from marketing or advertising.

Figure 18: Does your organisation / do your clients have a dedicated budget for digital media optimisation?

Perhaps the most interesting result from looking inside this data is that strong results don’t necessarily result in a dedicated budget for optimisation. Just over a quarter (28%) of those who report lower acquisition/lower media costs/more sales work with a specific budget, which is only a bit higher than the average for those who haven’t observed those effects (23%).

It’s common for optimisation to be part of a larger, channel-related budget. That’s certainly better than having no budget at all, but may not lead to the overall benefits which can result from a dedicated budget. Emphasis, accountability and flexibility go together with having a set budget number. Also, optimisation is most effective when it’s a cross-channel priority, and that’s less likely when resources are siloed.

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8. Companies still missing out on

advantages of real-time bidding Marketers have traditionally relied on click-through rates to ascertain if they reached the right

audiences and tune their media plan accordingly. The latency between the end of a campaign and

the moment the media plan was tweaked meant that what they were optimising might not have

been relevant (or effective) anymore.

As shown in Figure 12, real-time bidding is identified as an important tactic for optimising

display advertising by less than a fifth (18%) of in-house marketers and a quarter of agencies.

When asked how they buy display advertising, around two in five respondents (39% client-side

and 45% supply-side) indicate they use ad exchanges or real-time bidding.

Figure 19: How do you buy display advertising?

Despite the overhyped “death of ad networks”, the majority of display advertising dollars continue

to flow through these platforms, with three-quarters of companies surveyed using them for ad

campaigns.

When selecting the most beneficial route, it all comes down to the control, scale, sophistication

and extent of optimisation that technology can offer. If display is a major part of your advertising

efforts and you want to uncover how your target audience is interacting with display and other

channels (such as search or social), real-time bidding is an obvious choice.

Motivated by the increasing availability of real-time campaign performance data, organisations

are lured into boosting performance as their campaigns run. Some media companies such as The

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New York Times (changing the featured articles on

their homepage throughout the day) and The

Huffington Post (using real-time A/B testing to test

headlines) are typically at the forefront of using real-

time data, but not many organisations in other sectors

seem to make any forays in this area.

The chart on the left shows the extent of this problem:

only a quarter of companies say they are ‘able to

optimise media in real time’. Perhaps even more

worryingly, just under half (45%) disagree with the

statement.

Figure 20: ‘We are able to optimise our media in real time’

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9. Improved proposition for advertisers

helps Facebook dominate social budgets When it comes to paid advertising on Facebook, there is still significant variation in success: while

some marketers report high ROI from PPC ads, others have chosen to abandon the channel

completely and focus on other platforms.

In May 2012, days before Facebook’s widely anticipated initial public offering, General Motors

(and incidentally one of the largest US advertisers), made headlines when it stopped running paid

advertising on Facebook. One year later, the automaker revisited its decision and started testing

paid ads aimed at Facebook users who access their accounts on mobile devices. So what happened

between the ‘divorce’ and the ‘reconciliation’?

In a bid to capture a larger share of the growing performance marketing spend (and partly to

combat scepticism around ROI from its ads), Facebook ramped up its proposition for advertisers.

The company rolled out several platform updates and features in the last 12 months, particularly

focused on targeting and measurement capabilities:

Facebook Exchange (FBX), which was often dubbed as last year’s biggest news in the

world of digital advertising, opened up a large pool of inventory to programmatic buying.

Interestingly, FBX partners do all the selling and provide all the data, measurement and

optimisation. Retargeting is the primary tactic on FBX, enabling marketers to target people

who have already expressed an interest in their brands.

Custom and Lookalike Audiences

Back in September 2012, Facebook launched Custom Audiences, enabling advertisers to

target ads to users who have previously engaged with them, through partnerships with data

providers. Advertisers can upload their customer databases, which are matched against

Facebook profiles.

Lookalike Audiences, rolled out six months later, took this up a notch by finding audiences

that are similar to people in custom audiences. Advertisers can optimise for either Similarity

(top 1% of people who are most similar to the advertiser’s custom audience) or Greater Reach

(top 5% of people that are similar to the custom audience, but with a less precise match).

Incorporating third party data to deliver ads based on shopping habits

In April 2013, Facebook launched ‘partner categories’, a new self-serve advertising product

allowing advertisers to target specific categories of people based on their actual and potential

purchases, both in the online and offline space.

This entails integration of the social network’s proprietary data with information provided by

data companies such as Datalogix, Acxiom and Epsilon to help identify people who are in the

market for a specific product and group them in anonymised segments. At launch, this

included more than 500 unique categories.

Cost-per-action bidding

Advertisers can set price caps for certain types of desirable actions and Facebook will then

optimise ad placements to deliver ads to users that are more likely to convert on those actions.

While initially restricted to three action types (likes, offer claims and link clicks), bidding will

gradually include a wider range of actions.

And finally, Facebook is reportedly planning to dive into the lucrative video advertising

market by launching a video ad service this autumn. Speculations followed shortly after:

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the ads are said to be under 15 seconds long, automatically play without audio (which would

need to be enabled by the user) and come at a hefty price.1

All these efforts and changes seem to have paid off, as Facebook’s total ad revenue for the second

quarter of 2013 reached $1.6 billion, which represents an increase of 61% from the same quarter

last year. Figure 21 shows that marketers are spending the bulk of their social advertising budgets

on Facebook.

Companies surveyed indicate that, on average, spend on Facebook accounts for 41% of their

budgets, while agencies claim that the platform accounts for more than half (53%) of their clients’

budgets. While still very significant, LinkedIn and Twitter lag behind, capturing on average less

than a fifth of social advertising spend.

Figure 21: How is your / your clients’ social advertising budget split between the following properties?

When drilling down further into the specific types of social advertising companies are most likely

to invest in, Facebook newsfeed (66%) and marketplace (45%) ads take the top two spots. The

agency perspective is even more favourable, with the majority (84%) of respondents saying that

newsfeed ads are most popular among their clients. This is again followed by marketplace ads,

with three in five agencies (59%) mentioning them.

Despite the impressive click-through rates that have been bandied around, Facebook Exchange

doesn’t fare as well as Facebook’s other advertising products. It’s worth noting that the platform is

not far behind though, with around two in five companies indicating that they invest in promoted

tweets (40%), LinkedIn ads (37%) and FBX (36%).

1 http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323838204578654684050767080.html

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Uptake will definitely increase over the next few months, particularly when more brands will start

factoring in the impressive reach and lower cost of using FBX compared to other options.

Figure 22: Which types of social advertising do you (or your clients) invest in?

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10. Appendix

10.1. Use of paid-for media

Figure 23: Which of the following paid-for digital media channels do you / your

clients use?

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10.2. Respondent profiles This tenth Quarterly Digital Intelligence Briefing is based on an online survey of 600 client-side

and agency respondents, carried out in July 2013.

Figure 24: Which of the following best describes your company or role?

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10.2.1. Geography

Around two in five (44%) respondents are based in the UK. Just under a third (29%) are based in

Europe (non-UK) and 19% in North America. Other countries and regions represented include

Australia, South America and the Middle East.

Figure 25: In which country / region are you (personally) based?

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10.2.2. Business sector

Respondents work across a wide range of different industry sectors. The best represented sectors

are retail and mail order (16%), consumer products and services (11%) and financial services

(9%). A quarter of respondents specify ‘other’ as their sector, which include public sector/not-for

profit and IT.

Client-side respondents

Figure 26: In which business sector is your organisation?

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10.2.3. Job role

The survey had a senior audience, as shown in the chart below. Just under half (45%) of client-

side respondents are managers, while 15% hold CMO, director or VP positions. Additionally, 10%

are business owners or have board level roles.

Figure 27: What best describes your job role?

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10.2.4. Job function

The most common function of organisations surveyed is digital marketing, with half of client-side

respondents mentioning it. Customer acquisition (11%), advertising (7%) and search marketing

(6%) are the next most cited job functions.

Figure 28: What best describes your job function?

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10.2.5. Size of company by revenue

The chart below shows the annual revenue of responding (client-side) organisations.

At the upper end of the scale, around half of client-side respondents earn more than £50m each year.

Client-side respondents Figure 29: What is your annual company turnover?