The social giant Facebook announced that it has 2 million active advertisers. And that number has made Facebook the first internet company to ever get to Google's territory in term of online advertisements' influence.
Facebook's 2 million active advertisers is a 33 percent rise from 1.5 million it had in July 2014. Within that vast number of active advertisers, most represents small and medium-sized businesses that tend to spend $5 to $50 a day on advertisements. The rest goes to big brands that spend millions of dollars on the social network annually.
"Small business owners are really hard to reach and they are not tech savvy usually," Facebook's Chief Operating Officer, Sheryl Sandberg. She also mentioned that most of the growth comes from small businesses in Europe-Middle East-Africa and Asia Pacific regions.
About 80 percent of those small and medium-sized businesses start advertising via the Promoted Post feature.
Closing in to Google
Google is still the undefeated champion of online advertising. The company holds 31.1 percent of the market, or about 4 million active advertisers. The number went down slightly from 33.6 percent in 2013.
Facebook with 2 million active advertisers may not alert Google about its decreasing market share, this is mainly because the number of internet users have grown pretty much in the recent years. But Facebook's achievement is alarming.
Facebook that had 5.8 percent of the online advertising in 2013, rose to 7.8 percent in 2014. Its growth is impressive considering that in 2011, Google still had roughly 4 million advertisers and Facebook had just 500,000.
"Facebook is pushing a lot harder than Google," said eMarketers. "Google search is the king but it's getting more expensive." And according to analysts, Facebook is building an advantage because of its scale and ad targeting data.
Google that is still dominating the online advertising market, thanks to its popular search engine, will remain dominant in the close future. But Facebook's achievement in getting a huge chunk of the market, is certainly make the search giant to flex its muscles.
Facebook's initial strategy from the start is increasing its users in a massive scale. With huge amount of users, the company is expecting more advertisers. But more advertisers doesn't always translate to more revenue. Facebook acknowledged this, and instead of attracting advertisers in a massive scale, just like how it does with attracting users, Facebook is aiming to serve less ads, but make them more relevant. And it turn, marks up the price.
This happened in the late 2014. Facebook served 65 percent fewer ads, but increased its price up to 335 percent, according to the company's Finance Chief.
In theory, more advertisers means better-targeted ads for consumers. By serving more relevant ads, Facebook is expecting users to do more clicks on them, and better returns to advertisers. And all of that means more profit to third-party publishers that use Facebook's Atlas platform.
Allowing others to serve advertisements is Google's long time strategy. This has given the search giant the power and influence it is having now. And Facebook is doing just the same.
Google and Facebook, each with over a billion users, are pushing faster than the worldwide internet coverage and adoption. With Google and its "Project Loon" balloons and Facebook's Connectivity Labs with Internet.org initiative, both are racing in their own way to get more users, more advertisers ratio, and more influence.
New Mobile Advertisement Manager to Celebrate
To better support its users and their businesses, Facebook is also introducing Ads Manager for iOS. The app is the company's new way to give users the ability to manage their ads wherever they are. It will give business owners stats about their ads' engagements, cost per engagement, total reach and frequency. That information was previously available on the Ads Manager mobile site, which is used by more than 800,000 advertisers each month, according to Facebook.
The app's simple interface also makes it possible for advertisers to design ads directly on their mobile device by selecting photos directly from their device, or pull them from a post, write the ad text, and then target their desired audience using sliders and buttons to narrow down the list by demographic information.
