ADOTAS – Facebook had its first quarter in which more than half of its ad revenues came from mobile, and also its first quarter in which mobile ad revenues exceeded $1 billion, according to Q4/annual 2013 earnings data announced by The Social Network yesterday.
Revenues for Q4 2014 were nearly $2.6 billion.
Key stats from the report, according to Business Insider, are as follows:
- Revenues: $2.59 billion (up 63%).
- Earnings per share: 31 cents.
- Monthly active users: 1.23 billion (up 16%).
- Mobile monthly active users: 945 million (up 39%).
- Mobile ad revenue was 53% of total revenue.
- Net income: $523 million (up from $64 million).
- Revenue for the full year 2013 was $7.87 billion (up 55% year-over-year).
“Many of our customers have been drawn to Facebook’s platform because of its ability to target an audience across multiple devices,” said Joe McCormack, CEO of Adquant, a leading Facebook PMD. “Mobile now accounts for half of Facebook’s ad revenues because advertisers are willing to pay a premium for the quality offering that’s available via Facebook’s mobile news feed. We saw this trend start in Q2 2013 and we expect it to continue well into 2014 and beyond, and Facebook’s results that were announced today backup our conclusions.
“Over 2013, our customers averaged triple digit ad-spend growth on Facebook. The growth that we saw on our platform is in line with what Facebook announced today. We think this is attributable to the major improvements Facebook made to their ad platform on a monthly basis over the past year. Additionally, our customers are very excited about Facebook in 2014 and plan increasing their ad investment in this upcoming year. We think this is the clearest sign yet that Facebook has successfully made the transition since IPO, from being in an exploratory phase where they were not yet sure where their revenues would come from, to building a robust business with a quality set of products.”
“Facebook’s mobile business is the core driver of their explosive revenue growth over the past year or so,” added Marc Poirier, Co-Founder & EVP, Business Development at Acquisio. “Mobile ads are in the newsfeed, and newsfeed ads get as much as 30X more clicks than ads in the side bar. Sidebar ads were the only kind that were available for a while. The introduction of ads in the feed had a dramatic effect on Facebook’s revenue, which is not surprising since their model is to charge a cost per click. If they can get more clicks for each thousand impressions, then it stands to reason that their revenue will grow as well.”
Independent Data Analysis
In advance of the earnings call, 3Q Digital ran numbers for two accounts – one online retailer and one lead-generation company – and compared Q4 numbers to Q3. Each account showed:
- spikes in CPC and conversion rate, as was expected; CPC increased 47% and 50% in the two accounts from Q3 to Q4.
- CVR increased 61% and 41%. Volume was higher as well; the two accounts, which totaled over 120M impressions in Q4, increased 100% and 43% as the clients devoted more budget in light of the campaigns’ performance.
“Looking ahead, I think we can expect budgets to be strong across the board,” said Molly McCarty, Social Account Manager, 3Q Digital. “With the recent changes to Facebook’s advertising platform – including a much-needed improvement to the ads interface and the introduction of powerful new ad types late in Q3 – and the continual improvement of the algorithm, I fully expect performance to continue to be strong. I think it is safe to say that 2014 will be a year of positive changes for Facebook that will continue to reinforce Facebook as a leading platform for online advertising.”