Facebook's News Feed is Getting 60% of Total Ad Spend Across Facebook And Instagram

Marketing Land recently reported that the results of Socialbakers' Social Media Trends are in. It concluded that Facebook's News Feed ads scored the highest CTR when compared with Facebook video ads, Instagram news feed and Story ads.

The report examined Facebook and Instagram ad performance for more than 140,000 branded accounts during the second quarter of 2019 and discovered that Facebook News Feed ads attracted 60% of the total ad spend in the period:

“Instagram feed came in a distant second at 20%, and the rest of the top five — Instagram Stories, Facebook suggested video and Facebook in-stream video — combine for about 10%.”

It ranked the Facebook News Feed ads as the top performing ad placement with regard to CTR, and CPM. With CPC, it's a different story - Facebook News Feed and Facebook suggested video ads offer the lowest CPC across both Facebook and Instagram ad units. The combined CPC for Facebook News Feed, in-stream video and suggested video ads is the same as an Instagram Story ad — at just over $0.05. The highest CPC was Instagram News Feed ads.

Socialbakers also examined the types of organic content driving the most engagement across Facebook and Instagram. On Facebook, live video outperformed all other content types as per interaction ranking. Surprisingly then, live video constituted only 0.4% of brands’ organic posting. That seems to suggest that efforts to hosting livestreams more often would be more effective than a regular post.

On Instagram, Carousel posts attract the most interactions – however, they only get used 15% to 18% of the time. On both Instagram and Facebook, the majority of branded organic content was image posts.

This is all surprising when you consider that just last year, multiple reports indicated that Instagram ad spend was booming compared to Facebook’s share of ad spend. When you think about the fact that Instagram outshines its parent platform on ad spend and that Facebook’s daily active user growth remained flat during the study period, it’s notable that those factors don’t seem to be having a negative impact on Facebook’s standing as the ad giant among all of the social platforms.