The Importance of Diversifying Media Investments
“Don’t put all your eggs in one basket” is a long standing phrase that can be applied to media investments.
Google and Meta platforms have had a dominant combined share of the digital advertising market for years. However, their hold on the sector is easing with their 50% combined share forecast to continue dropping in the next two years, as the likes of TikTok, Apple, Reddit and others grow their customer and audience base and muscle their way into the market.
There is an ever growing supply of channels to run your ads on social these days, so you may be wondering where to invest to get the best return. The question is: what do you want to achieve from your campaigns?
Looking for reach? Then Meta is the choice for you. We see higher CPM’s than other channels, but much lower frequencies. If you want to make the most of your budget and serve as many impressions as possible, Snapchat, TikTok & Reddit are currently leading the way for low CPM’s.
Looking at recent campaign performance across channels, Snapchat can be up to 79% lower per 1,000 impressions compared to Meta for brand awareness objectives. However, you see the trade off for high volumes of impressions with a much higher frequency, especially for big budget campaigns. On average we have seen frequency on Snapchat up to 8 times higher than Meta, but if you are looking to drive brand awareness, a higher frequency may not be the worst trade off for CPM’s that low!
We also often see different behaviours across channels. Typically across Meta there are higher volumes of click thru rate coming from the older age groups. On newer platforms, we see more ad interactions coming from younger generations. You can set your age targeting, but with the narrow audiences normally comes increased costs. Instead, you could just look to split your media investment across channels where you know your audience is more active. Want those Gen Z’ers to get clicking? Then Facebook might not be the best place to reach them, as they often move between the trending apps at the time.
When we look at the lower funnel activities driving awareness and consideration, we see the “smaller” platforms driving high volumes of cheap impressions. Although, this does seem to result in particularly low CTR%’s compared to the likes of Meta BUT they are still effective in driving traffic with cost per click up to 37% cheaper for Snapchat & Reddit while on TikTok we have seen it even cheaper still as much as 92% lower.
Results in one vertical or for one client don’t guarantee the same results across the board. These results give strong indications of the types of performance possible across these channels and how important it is to try new things and not invest in just one platform. Even a small investment of your budget in other channels can show great returns.
Brand awareness and consideration are great optimisations for branding and getting your ads seen by the masses, but when it comes to driving people down the funnel and attributing sales, Meta is still the bigger player in social advertising right now, with most advertisers on social having the Meta Pixel already on their site. Although attribution has taken a hit post iOS 14+, we are still able to see strong results for conversions across Meta channels even if the clicks are more expensive than TikTok.
Across other channels, advertisers have been slower or haven’t yet adopted their Pixels, either over implementation & privacy concerns or the lack of attribution capabilities. TikTok has made the biggest steps in encouraging the use of its Pixel, as earlier in the year they instituted a requirement that advertisers collect and pass third-party cookies to TikTok through the pixel in an attempt to improve their campaign attribution. This had previously been based on single user sessions where conversions or purchases made later on a different browser or device wouldn’t be connected to the campaign.
Maximising results is what we all want to see (to misquote Jerry Maguire: “Show me the impressions!”) but that does require some work and often the best results come from a less rigid approach to your campaigns. You can publish your ads, sit back and watch results come in or you can review your early results, learn from them, optimise your campaign and be more fluid with your budget to get the best possible results.
Percentage calculation are based on multiple campaigns, verticals and budgets across a mixture of lower funnel objections primarily focused on driving awareness & consideration (imp, video views, traffic)
Sources:
[1]https://www.insiderintelligence.com/content/meta-google-s-hold-on-digital-advertising-loosens-tiktok-others-gain-share
[2]https://www.adexchanger.com/online-advertising/tiktok-adds-third-party-cookies-to-its-pixel-and-tries-to-eat-facebooks-lunch/