Cost of Facebook ads rises sharply as Google ad share continues to grow

Post by Steven Cox on 12th October 2011
 in Display advertising, E-commerce, Finance, Google, PPC, Search

Companies increased their spending on advertising on Facebook UK by 25 per cent between July and September, according to new figures.

The latest quarterly report by marketing performance analysts Efficient Frontier shows that the social media network is also becoming a more popular medium through which users connect directly with advertisers.

Click-through rates on ads across Facebook in the UK rose by 18.5 per cent over the quarter, it said.

But that has had the knock-on effect of forcing advertisers to pay more to put their products in front of the site's audience. The cost-per-click of Facebook ads shot up by 54 per cent between June and September, the report also showed.

Despite the increase, Jonathan Beeston, global marketing director of Efficient Frontier, believed advertisers on Facebook still got good returns on their investment: "Used well, Facebook advertising integrates [with] search and social engagement to give a combined result that is better than the sum of its parts," he said.

The same research also found that Google's share of the PPC and display advertising markets in the UK rose by 2.5 per cent year-on-year, but that, proportionately, advertisers were paying less per click on advertisements on the Yahoo and Bing search network.