Pathmatics has revealed that social media is set to dominate advertising trends for the year ahead.
This comes as the digital marketing intelligence platform has invested heavily in its platform to better understand the use of social media by launching mobile app-specific panels in Australia for Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok to complement its Facebook insights that have existed since January 2020.
Analysing the top 20 Australian social media advertisers over the last six months, Pathmatics has found:
• Australia’s top 20 social media advertisers invested 78% of their digital advertising spend on social media platformsin H2 2022 while only committing 22% to traditional digital channels (such as web and mobile sites).
– Of the top 20 companies, those over indexing on their social media allocation(>78%) include Google (96%), Fever Labs (96%), Telstra (91%) and Macquarie Group (90%)
– Of those top 20 companies, those under indexing on their social media allocation (<78%) include Amazon (56%), McDonalds (61%) and Yum! Brands (63%)
• Facebook is the most popular social platform, with the top 20 brands committing 63% of their social budget compared to Instagram (27%), TikTok (7%) and Snapchat (3%).
– Meta takes close to 90% of the social media budget
• Fever Labs (who raised almost $300m investment funding in 2022), allocated 96% of their digital advertising to social media, promoting tickets to “secret and unknown” local attractions
• The retail industry has the largest digital advertising spend ($242,685,900) with 86% of this put towards social media advertising
– This is followed by Consumer Packaged Goods ($183,775,600, 73%), Financial Services ($171,976,700, 71%) and Food & Drink Services ($164,669,700, 71%)
• While Woolworths leads the charge as top social media spender, competitor Coles does not appear in the Top 20 list
– Pathmatics data can reveal that Coles has a similar percentage allocation of social and traditional digital channels with 71% going to social compared to Woolworths (79%).
Eugene Du Plessis, Pathmatics’ regional director Australia and New Zealand, said of the data: “As budgets continue to tighten due to global and local economic downturn it becomes ever more important for advertisers, agencies and consultancies to understand the latest trends and how best to respond with more scrutiny being placed on making every dollar count.
“With a unique set of benefits that traditional digital channels sometimes struggle to match, social media is expected to play an even bigger role in driving brand awareness, generating leads, and building closer customer relationships for 2023.
“These platforms allow for highly-specific targeting options and from what I’ve been told, is an easier process when it comes to running campaigns from a placement, payment and measurement perspective.
“For the year ahead, it is likely that we will see a rise in engagement across TikTok in particular – a platform which is growing in popularity and reaching millions of millennial and Gen Z Aussies every day,” he said.
“With the same audience demographic as TikTok, it will also be interesting to see how Snapchat performs and whether the platform will make a conscious effort to get in front of brands, advertisers, publishers, and investors to increase their prominence.
“We will be keeping a close eye on any fluctuations in the popularity of these platforms and how they stack up in the digital advertising sphere,” Du Plessis added.