You may wonder how much effort it takes to promote mobile applications at scale. In this article we will cover only one aspect — facebook advertisement. We will take a look at three heavily promoted applications: NewsBreak, TikTok and Spotify, analyze data from Facebook Ads Library and make the digest out of it. We will focus on advertisement campaigns of September 2020.
Mostly we will look at two metrics: daily published banners and the subset of these which we call “banners with new media content” — banners which images or videos were never seen before in ads library. We believe the last one is a more accurate measure of the efforts put in advertising, since creating 100 videos is more labour-intensive than using one video in 100 banners.
Who is the leader?
Let’s start with the most prolific facebook advertiser in Sept.2020 — which is the “NewsBreak” application, at some days launching 9K banners from which 4K had new media content. Here is the daily distribution:
If we average this, on each day they’ve published:
- 3839 banners
- 1716 of which had media content never seen before
- 1704 of that 1716 banners were single image banners
We can only guess how much people are involved in such a massive content generation organization or what kind of automation do they have. In total these ads were run from 748 facebook business pages.
Comparing Advertising Strategies
Now we will compare “NewsBreak” with other heavily advertised applications: “Spotify” and “TikTok”.
- Media content — create or reuse?
You may wonder, do advertisers really produce ads each day or just reuse the old ones. Surprisingly they do produce lots of ads each day:
TikTok creates more new media content, than reuses, while Spotify and NewsBreak reuse more than create new.
2. Which banners formats are preferred?
Facebook gives you a variety of formats to choose from — image, video, multi-image, multi-videos, multi-media. Breaking down formats usage:
TikTok and Spotify prefer video banners, while NewsBreak is heavy on image banners. Both of them avoid complicated banner formats — DCO, multi-image and multi-video.
3. What advertisers do on weekends?
Typically your ads get more traffic on weekends, people are relaxing and using social media more. Working on weekends can be a good strategy, let’s check what is the average numbers of new media content banners generated on workdays and weekends:
Spotify is more relaxed on the weekends than the others, they work only at 15% power. TikTok advertisers works almost as there is no weekends.
Summing Up
The amount of banners published daily by these top performers is astonishing. They both reuse and create new media content on a daily basis and avoid complicated banner formats (DCO, Multi-Image, Multi-Video). If you want to make the next “Spotify” probably you should advertise like “Spotify” and we gave you the numbers to compare yourself with.
Also, we at macaw.pro have much more data about facebook ads so you’re welcome to join and take a look!
