Understanding Meta advertising trends is essential for marketers. Meta is growing and shifting alongside its user base – evolving to fit market needs.
Meta advertising trends for 2024
In 2024, Meta, and Facebook in particular, are continuing to shift away from written posts and pictures and towards short-form videos. The rise of TikTok has caused many social media networks to question their strategy and product, and Meta is no exception. eMarketer predicts that by 2025, adults in the US will spend more time on TikTok than on Facebook.
Meta holds in its hand the favor of marketers and the potential for higher ad revenue. eMarketer adds that while TikTok will remain dominant with users in 2024, Facebook is going to be the higher revenue earner, with Facebook bringing in $1.02 per user, per hour by 2025.
Analyst Debra Aho Williamson describes the reason for this discrepancy in the podcast Behind the Numbers, saying: “Advertisers are just wedded to Meta…From the perspective of an advertiser wanting to have a regular, reliable partner to advertise on, Meta is still going to get that lion’s share of dollars.”
Advertisers are going to remain loyal to Meta not because of how the platform performs with users, but because of its familiarity and ease of use from a marketing perspective. Even though TikTok is the preferred short-form video app among users, the operational capabilities and ad products that Meta provides continue to keep them on the winning side with marketers.
Alongside the predominance of short-form video, here are some other key Meta advertising trends for 2024:
AI and retail take priority
As economic uncertainty continues to be a top concern for consumers and advertisers alike, commerce and retail are emerging as a steady ground to walk while the financial landscape evens out.
Retail was the largest ad spending vertical in 2023, accounting for 27.9% of US digital ad spending. This has led social networks to put their retail networks at the top of their priority list for the coming year, with Meta placing continued emphasis on their Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns (ASC+).
AI was also a top priority for Meta towards the end of 2023 and will continue to be so in 2024.
The company launched its AI Sandbox in May of 2023, providing advertisers with a testing environment to experiment with emerging AI-powered tools, including an automated background generation tool for product images and an automatic resizing tool. These tools make it even easier for advertisers to create images that fit Meta’s ad formats.
While advertisers aren’t keen to jump on the generative AI bandwagon, Meta is hedging its bets with this new suite of tools and is likely to persist with its AI efforts in the new year.
Ad supply will continue to soar
Ad supply is not an issue on Meta’s platforms going into 2024. In fact, its ad supply is oversized. In Meta’s Q2 2023 earnings call, the company declared it had sold 34% more impressions than in 2022; the company is going to continue to have ample supply in the new year.
Since starting to sell ad space on previously under-monetized platforms, like Instagram’s search results and Reels, Meta’s had a huge uptick in impressions. This is going to continue next year, with both Reels and Instagram Search growing in popularity with users.
Instagram Reels in particular was a major win for Meta in Q2 2023. For a third quarter in a row, CPMs on Instagram dropped. Not only did they drop, they dropped 29% YoY. This was largely due to Meta’s increased ad load and new Reels ad formats.
In addition to the Meta’s success with Instagram Search and Reels, it has also seen major growth on Facebook. The quintessential social media platform now has over 3 billion users, with its daily active user rate climbing from 2.04 billion to 2.06 billion in Q2 2023.
Since Meta has seen such great success with Instagram and Facebook in 2023, the company will likely continue to treat the platforms as its bread and butter going into 2024.
Threads is unraveling
Along with this success, the company had some bumps along the road in 2023, which is likely going to impact Meta advertising trends in 2024. Specifically, Threads was a massive issue for the company. eMarketer predicts the new social platform will continue to decline, declaring that the network is “already unraveling.”
This prediction came only a few weeks after Meta launched Instagram Threads, dominating tech and media headlines in the wake of Twitter’s sudden rebrand to X. While users flocked to the platform initially, usage steadily dropped.
It’s worth noting the “Twitter knock-off” isn’t dead just yet and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said that Threads is “in line with his expectations”. Perhaps 2024 has some surprises in store for Threads users and marketers alike.
The future is never set in stone, but predictions can help guide strategy and put marketers ahead of the curve. Whether or not Meta will continue to soar in 2024 is unknown, but it remains a safe bet for advertisers around the world.
If you’re looking to see even more of illumin’s predictions for 2024, be sure to check out our Programmatic advertising trends to watch in 2024. You can also read our advertising trends from fall 2023 to see how last season wrapped up.
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