Dive Brief:

• When comparing consumer trust around digital ad platforms, Google bests Facebook across all age groups per research from Survata made available to Marketing Dive. Overall Google was trusted by 38% of respondents compared to 30% for Facebook, followed by YouTube (10%), Pinterest (9%), Instagram (8%), Twitter (3%) and Snapchat (2%). Among 18-24-year-olds Google (29%) and YouTube (21%) topped Instagram (18%) and Facebook (15%), and for 25 and up Google had an even more dramatic trust advantage at 41% followed by Facebook at 34%.
• The different age groups each had their own ideas about which platform had the best, meaning most natural, ad experience. The consensus put Google on top at 30%, but broken down by age demographics, the 18-24 group placed Instagram at the top at 22% while the older group felt Facebook had the best ad experience at 33%.
• Interestingly, Facebook took the top spot for delivering the most relevant ads at 38% overall, 23% for 18-24 and 42% for 25 and up. It also took the top spot as the platform most likely to show ads that expose consumers to new businesses at 38% overall. A result possibly tied to the trust survey question found Google is the platform that consumers said made them most likely to make a purchase at 38% overall, 26% for 18-24 and 41% for 25 and up.

Dive Insight:

The big takeaway from the study is the markedly lower levels among all the categories, including trust, experience, relevance, commerce and exposure to new businesses reported by the 18-24 group compared to the 25-and-older cohort. The Survata study indicates younger generations growing up used to multiple digital ad platforms have a different analysis of online ads overall, making it more complicated for brands to target those groups, Guillermo Murga, marketing lead at Survata, told Marketing Dive in an email.

Drilling deeper into the demographic data, the 25-34 age group favored Facebook in every category except for ad experience which Google took. By platform, Instagram fell sharply with the 44 and older group, and by gender, YouTube won men by a 2:1 margin while Pinterest won women by the same ratio.

One result Survata found surprising was it expected discovery and commerce to be closely aligned and the same for relevancy and trust, but the survey results found that trust and purchase behavior were actually highly correlated. Best ad experience was an outlier and was the most competitive category in the survey.