Social Networks Delivering High Display Ad Impressions For Low Cost… an Opportunity For Internet Marketers?
By Anna Johnson on October 21st, 2009The combination of greater and longer viewership on the one hand, and lower CPMs on the other, means that running display ads on social networks may just make sense for Internet marketers, or is at least worth testing…
Analysis by eMarketer suggests that with more people spending time on social networks, Internet marketers’ display advertisements are also getting greater exposure. In particular, data from comScore indicates that the top 20 percent of social network users visit networking sites an average of 2.4 times per day, spending 31 minutes on such sites — twice as long as the same users spend with email or instant (Messaging).
eMarketer makes the point that, correspondingly, social network users are spending more time with display ads.
And while comScore’s research indicates that over 20 percent of all online display ads are displayed on social networks (the bulk on Facebook and MySpace), just 3.5 percent of total U.S. display ad budgets are going to the social networking sites.
This implies that social networks are offering a lot of ad exposure for relatively little cost.
Whilst Internet marketers will need to test whether their niches are responsive to advertisements on social networks – and certainly the major social network audiences, along with the display ad medium itself, tend to lend themselves to mass marketing – the economics may just work out.
At the very least, you might want to test running a campaign on a network where it seems to make sense.
Source: eMarketer, “Low CPMs Stall Social Network Ad Spend”, eMarketer, October 13, 2009
