Dive Brief:
- Facebook’s Q4 and full year earnings report found an 18% year-over-year increase in daily active users reaching 1.23 billion, and 84% of Q4 advertising revenue came from mobile ads, up from 80% the same quarter last year.
- The tech giant’s mobile daily active users in December hit 1.15 billion, a 17% year-over-year increase.
- “We've seen continued growth and engagements on our platform, and our ads business is doing well, too. Total revenue grew by 51% year-over-year to $8.8 billion, and advertising revenue was up 53% to $8.6 billion,” said CEO Mark Zuckerberg in the earnings call.
Dive Insight:
Zuckerberg also pointed out the importance of video in Facebook’s plans, citing adding a video tab on the mobile app and ongoing improvement to live video including experimenting with live 360 video, more camera effects and promises for more updates to come. Zuckerberg mentioned moves to reduce spam and clickbait, as well as fake news in the form of misinformation and hoaxes; growth in Instagram and Facebook’s messaging apps; and investments, enhancements and long-term plans with cutting-edge tech like artificial intelligence and virtual reality.
For marketers, the key news is the ongoing need to optimize for mobile with COO Sheryl Sandberg mentioning that Hershey’s used Facebook Live and video ads to launch Cookie Layer Crunch and optimized those video ads to grab attention during the first few seconds and added captions for viewers who had audio turned off. For those ads Nielsen Brand Effect measured an 11 point lift in brand awareness and a 20 point lift in brand recall. Both tactics in Facebook video ads are something that marketers should consider implementing in their own campaigns.
Other 2016 advertising developments by the tech giant include increased tailoring of ad products for vertical to appeal to mobile users and investment in Dynamic Ads across Facebook, Instagram and the Facebook Audience Network ad platform. Sandberg also addressed the issue Facebook faced last year in ad metrics reporting stating the company took action to fix the errors and reviewed all of its measurement metrics while expanding partnerships with third-party verifiers.
