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Facebook's total revenue grew to more than $2.9 billion and advertising revenue climbed 67 percent from a year ago, its CEO said in a earnings conference call last night.
And for its growth, Facebook thanks the 30 million small businesses and its 1.5 million active marketers who use the world's No. 1 social media platform.
"To continue delivering the best returns for marketers, we’ve been very focused on improving the quality of the ad experiences for our community," CEO Mark Zuckerberg (left) said. "Our goal here is to make ads as interesting and useful as your friends' content on Facebook. We're investing heavily in this area, and this quarter we launched a number of efforts to improve the quality and relevance of our ads, including our new ads preferences tool, interest-based advertising and improvements to News Feed designed to reduce low-quality content."
Facebook Buy-In
Marketers still believe in Facebook. Zuckerberg said for the second quarter this year his company's advertising revenue grew by 67 percent from a year ago. Mobile now accounts for 62 percent of Facebook's advertising revenue.
More than a billion people use Facebook on their phones every month, and more than 80 percent of the top apps on iOS and Android now use Facebook Login.
"We think we’re in a great position to be the ‘cross-platform platform’ that lets developers build great apps across every platform," Zuckerberg said.
It's clear from Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg's comments Facebook is investing in attracting more marketers. Why wouldn't they? Mobile ad revenue grew 151 percent year over year, and now makes up
62 percent of Facebook's ad revenue.
"We continue to focus on three key areas of investment -- capitalizing on the shift to mobile, growing
the number of marketers using Facebook and building our ad products," Sandberg said. "These investments continue to generate broad-based growth."
Sandberg said Facebook's building "the world’s first ad platform that delivers personalized marketing at scale."
"While we believe it is still early days," she added, "we’re pleased with the progress we’re making."
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Personalized marketing at scale, Sandberg said, can drive results for all types of marketers.
Facebook's also "making great strides" helping larger brands "who increasingly recognize how our scale, targeting and measurement capabilities can drive great results."
Facebook wants to focus on how brand marketers can "leverage our technology platform to build their brands through creative storytelling."
New Features
The company's also committed to investing in product development like its Custom Audiences capabilities, which enables better targeting, Sandberg said. Earlier this year, Facebook launched Website Custom Audiences, which enables marketers to target recent visitors to their websites.
"This is like retargeting, but even more effective because it works across both web and mobile," said Sandberg, who also mentioned success with auto-play videos and ads on Instagram.
"In all of this," she added, "we remain focused on the transition to mobile. Our recently launched Audience Network lets advertisers use Facebook targeting while extending their campaigns beyond Facebook. This can improve the relevance of ads people see both on and off Facebook, and we’re encouraged by the early response."
Title image by Frederic Legrand (Shutterstock).
