Facebook’s Ad Machine Keeps Rolling; Key Q2 Metrics For Marketers

To no one’s surprise, Facebook again crushed Wall Street expectations during its quarterly financial call yesterday, reporting revenue of $2.9 billion during the quarter the ended in June. The great majority — 92% — of that revenue total came from Facebook’s advertising juggernaut, an increase of 67% over the same quarter in 2013. In short […]

Chat with MarTechBot

facebook-likes-1200

To no one’s surprise, Facebook again crushed Wall Street expectations during its quarterly financial call yesterday, reporting revenue of $2.9 billion during the quarter the ended in June. The great majority — 92% — of that revenue total came from Facebook’s advertising juggernaut, an increase of 67% over the same quarter in 2013.

In short there are no signs of a slowdown for Facebook, which eMarketer expects to capture nearly 8% of global digital ad revenue, and more than 22% of mobile ad revenue this year.

“Our team has a really strong belief in what we are building the world’s first ad platform that delivers personalized marketing at scale,” chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg said during the call.

Sandberg had many success metrics to share. Here are some of the key marketing takeaways:

  • Facebook now has 1.5 million active advertisers, up from the 1 million it had previously reported.
  • Custom Audiences, which was enhanced last month with better the targeting and retargeting features, is being adopted quickly (and is now “being used by 91 of the AdAge 100”)
  • The World Cup — which spawned 3 billion interactions from 350 million people — was a brand-building bonanza on Facebook, Sandberg said.  McDonald’s, for instance, was able to reach 125 million people in 158 countries with its FryFutbol promotion.
  • Small and medium businesses continue to get value from the platform with Sandberg reiterating the previously reported statistic that 30 million small businesses have Facebook Pages, 19 million of which access them via mobile devices. One of those small businesses, India-based Chumbak, uses Facebook as its main marketing channel. Sandberg said Facebook is responsible for 35% of Chumbak’s online revenue and 37% of its website traffic.
  • Proctor and Gamble’s Gillette reached 60% of its target audience with a feature-phone campaign to launch a new razor in India, where 80% of the 100 million Facebook users are on mobile, most of those on feature phones.
  • Results from premium video ads, which reportedly sell for $1 million a day, have been promising. Facebook has run only about a dozen campaigns and is still proceeding slowly to make sure it doesn’t annoy its users. In response to a question about whether TV advertisers are starting to look more to Facebook, Sandberg pointed to the Progressive Insurance campaign as an example of new thinking.  “For a long time people have thought TV was for creative storytelling and online ads work for more targeted text based results,” she said. “And I think we’re seeing that change, which means that the way people approach TV, they’ll also approach Facebook and are starting to, which makes those budgets work much better together.”
  • Sandberg said Facebook sees a huge opportunity to help businesses drive offline sales by using the platform: “We think we have a real advantage here, that we have real identity, that we have real identity across the desktop and across mobile and we have found ways and very privacy protected ways to work with third-party users of data to connect offline sales to online ads and those investments remain a very big focus for us.”

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily MarTech. Staff authors are listed here.


About the author

Martin Beck
Contributor
Martin Beck was Third Door Media's Social Media Reporter from March 2014 through December 2015.

Get the must-read newsletter for marketers.