Facebook now has 4 million advertisers, and the high figure underlines the increased importance of mobile ads to consumers and marketers. The social network's Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg went into detail about the increasing number of ads on its platform.
When looking at Facebook's advertising engine, mobile ads rule supreme. Specifically, 84 percent of total sales in Q2 2016 came from mobile advertising, a 12 percent increase over last year.
Facebook registered a significant revenue boost in the period, with mobile ads and especially mobile video formats leading the charge.
Estimates from research enterprise eMarketer place Facebook's global ad revenue for 2016 at about $22.37 billion, making Facebook the second ad publisher, after Google. Half of the ads are expected to come from overseas advertisers.
Facebook scored a mounting success by opening mobile ad campaigns on its main app and Instagram. Experts are gauging the latter's revenue for this year at about $1.5 billion, due to the massive popularity of the image-centric app with the millennial demographic.
Six months ago, Facebook announced 3 million active advertisers on its platform.
"The small screen is now big, because the small screen can do big things," Sandberg says.
The Facebook COO says that her company puts every effort into crafting ads that are user-friendly, simple to use and providing "low cost and high ROI." The company aims to gain additional value by encouraging small businesses to create Facebook Pages for their startups, even without buying ads.
Facebook points out that it is the best place for small business to run a video ad campaigns on. Statistics show that more than one-fifth of Facebook's advertisers crafted a video ad during the last month. This means that 800,000 businesses saw value in video ads and chose them over other ways of sending their message across.
It is no news that consumers are actively seeking more video content, and the expectancy to see video ads on business pages has grown.
More than 85 percent of active business Pages are tapping into mobile capabilities, with 40 percent of active advertisers having built a Facebook ad on mobile.
"[W]e're living through the fastest adoption of a communication technology that the world has ever seen," Sandberg states.
To put it in perspective, make note that the average American checks their smartphone 150 times, daily.
The social media company states that Southeast Asia is the fastest booming market for advertising. The top five countries that invested in Facebook's ads, measured year-over-year are U.S., Brazil, Vietnam, Mexico and the U.K.
