Facebook takes a back seat to Instagram as ad spend on the Facebook-owned app grows 177%

Advertisers are continuing to shift ad dollars from Facebook to Instagram resulting in an astounding amount of growth for the Facebook-owned app compared to its parent company. Facebook ad spend (excluding Instagram revenue) grew 40 percent year over year in Q2 2018, while ad spends on Instagram jumped a whopping 177 percent during the same time period, according to Merkle’s recent digital marketing report analyzing year-over-year social ad and search trends across the agency’s client base in Q2. Instagram impressions jumped 209 percent, and CPMs (average cost per 1,000 impressions) decreased by 10 percent. The rise in Facebook ad spend came largely from higher CPMs, which were 70 percent higher than the prior year. Ad impressions on Facebook fell by 17 percent year over year.
Despite Instagram’s surge, it remains significantly smaller in terms of advertising investment. “For the median advertiser actively bidding on both platforms, Instagram accounted for 23 percent as much spend as Facebook in Q2,” reports Merkle. The image-based app generated 20 percent as many ad impressions and just 9 percent as many clicks relative to Facebook in the quarter.