In kicking off Facebook’s Q3 earnings call Tuesday, CEO Mark Zuckerberg told investors that ad revenue grew by 64% and that mobile accounted for two thirds of that revenue. Mobile users of Facebook grew by 29% year over year, he reported, topping the billion mark.
COO Sheryl Sandberg (above) said that Facebook would continue to capitalize on consumers’ shift to mobile, and that the social network’s goal was to create a better user experience for visitors and better returns for marketers through more precise targeting of ads.
“Facebook age and gender targeting is 44% more accurate than the industry average,” Sandberg claimed. “We can also target based on people’s interests. With our Custom Audiences, companies can use their own data to build audiences.”
Sandberg said that Facebook would continue to roll out advertising options on Instagram and that the company’s recent re-introduction of the Atlas ad platform was receiving strong interest from large brands looking to deliver highly relevant ads across all devices. “Over 90% of in-store sales come from people who saw an ad but didn’t click on it, so last click attribution is not a good indicator,” she said. “Atlas connects online marketing to in-store sales in a privacy protective way.”
Touting Facebook’s prowess, Sandberg told of a MetLife campaign in which Merkle used Custom Audiences to attract people to insurance quote pages and saw a 2.4X higher success rate than the brand’s next best performing channel.
“Our investments in ad tech are long term,” Sandberg said. “These are large and strategic investments.”
