31 Mar How Digital Advertising Dollars will Shift in Upcoming Years

Digital Advertising budgets are on the rise, and big players like Facebook, Twitter, Google, Pandora and LinkedIn are all fighting for the ever-growing budget of marketers and companies. According to new data by eMarketer, “traditional” online companies such as Google and Yahoo are expected to continue a downward trend for the next few years, while social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter are only expected to increase their market share. Here is what you need to know about the Digital Marketing, it’s key players and how they are expected to do in upcoming years:

Digital Advertising spend to continue growing, with mobile as the driving force

According to eMarketer’s findings, digital display advertising will total $27.05 billion in 2015. That number is expected to surpass $37 billion by 2017, up from around $22 billion last year. With users spending more time than ever on their mobile devices, the findings project the spend in mobile display advertising to surpass desktop-based ads for the first time this year, growing to more than twice that of desktop advertising by 2017.

Facebook and Twitter will benefit the most from the increase in mobile-ad spending

The increase in mobile-ad spending over the traditional desktop ads that dominated years prior means that platforms dominating the mobile experience will thrive. Facebook and Twitter are two major players in this study expected to grow their market share, mostly due to their expected success in the mobile-ad space. Both platforms have proven to be ahead of the curve on engaging and retaining users on mobile, but also improving their mobile-ad capabilities, which is expected will take them to the top of mobile display revenue by 2017. After growing considerably in mobile-ad revenue year after year, Facebook is expected to reach revenue of $7.53 billion by 2017. Meanwhile, Twitter is projected to reach $2.29 billion by that same year, almost on par with Google’s projected performance, with the search giant still growing but at a much slower rate that the famous micro-blogging platform.

Facebook to continue it’s impressive growth; “traditional” players to dip

As an agency running multiple online advertising campaigns, we have found Facebook to be the most robust advertising platform out there. The sheer amount of user data it handles means it offers unmatched targeting capabilities, which together with very competitive rates for all sort of objectives (impressions, click-through, engagements, app downloads, video views, etc.) makes it a favorite among marketers.

In 2014, Facebook saw their Display Ad Revenues increase 61% compared to 2013, which gave them by far the biggest market-share at 23.8%. By 2017, eMarketer projects Zuckerberg’s company to grow at a slower rate but still trending up to over a quarter of the total online ad display market. This grow is expected to come at the cost of more “old-school” players in this space, with Google, Yahoo, AOL and Microsoft all losing market share. For reference, Back in 2009 eMarketer reported the following market-share for the same platforms: Facebook 7%, Yahoo! 15.8%, Google 4.5%, Microsoft 4.6% and AOL 6.4%.