go-Digital Blog on Digital Marketing

The study surveyed more than 500 executives from large companies with some functional responsibility for social media, with about half of those respondents coming from companies with $1 billion or more in annual revenues.

Overall, roughly 30% of respondents’ social media budgets are incremental, meaning that social has its own new and distinct budget. Next on the list, about one-quarter of social media budgets are being derived from digital media funds. Traditional media are not immune to the pull of social media: 8.7% of social budgets overall (12.6% of budgets from the largest companies) are being pulled from TV, with print (12% overall; 10.9% of the largest) and radio (3.2% overall; 3.5% of the largest) also raided for funds.

For the most part, social media initiatives are falling under the brand marketing and digital media budget areas, according to respondents, although the extent to which that’s true differs fairly significantly by sector. (CPG companies’ social budgets are more likely to fall under the brand marketing umbrella than retailers, for example.)

The prognosis for soci! al media ! spending looks good, according to the report, echoing results from other studies (such as this one). About two-thirds of respondents are planning to increase their spending on social media in the upcoming budget cycle.

The next-most common search retargeting goal is increased brand revenue (23.1%), followed by acquiring new customers (10.9%) and increasing on-site engagement (10.9%).

Site retargeting goals are prioritized very differently by the media buyers polled across the US, Canada and the UK. Brand revenue and new customers are each considered the primary goal by 33.2% of respondents, although acquiring new customers is by far the primary goal among brand respondents (47.8%). While on-site engagement is a greater site retargeting goal than brand awareness (16% vs. 11.8%) on average, brand respondents are far less concerned with on-site engagement than agencies.

Integration with other marketing initiatives counts as the main challenge of using both search and site retargeting, with lack of transparency the second-most cited challenge for both tactics.

Asked where their retargeting budgets come from, respondents most commonly cited other display channels and tactics (34.1%), while about 1 in 5 said retargeting has its own budget (21.4%). Overall, about half of the respondents will increase their site, search and FBX retargeting budgets.

Simplicity is defined as the ease of interactions and communications with a brand (e.g., researching, purchasing, interacting with customer service, etc.).

US respondents will pay the highest premiums (4.1% or more) to retail/fashion, electronics, appliances, restaurants, and fitness brands. That list has grown from last year, when Americans would only pay that premium to 2 industries (restaurants and grocery).

Americans also claim that they will pay 3.6-4% more for simplified experiences and interactions with brands across a range of industries, including automotive, travel/air, health insurance, travel/booking, retail/grocery, internet retail and general retail, according to the latest survey.

That confirms survey evidence that Facebook is losing its luster among the younger demographic: a recent survey from Piper Jaffray found that for the first time, it was not named by teens as their “most important” social network, surrendering that distinction to Twitter.

There are some important things to remember here, though: Facebook also said that overall usage by US teens was stable, so reports of teens “fleeing” Facebook might be overstating things a hair. Also, Facebook says it is still “close to fully penetrated among teens” – and teens themselves report a far greater inclination to be spending time on Facebook rather than Twitter.

Finally, Twitter emerged as teens’ most-important social network in the Piper Jaffray study virtually by default, as the perce! ntage of ! teens giving it that title actually decreased quarter-over-quarter. The real riser? Facebook-owned Instagram, named most important by 23% of teens (on par with Facebook itself), up from just 12% in the year-earlier period. So there’s that.

Some other tidbits from the latest release:

• Total monthly active user growth (predictably) continues to slow, up by about 2.9% quarter-over-quarter, following a 4.1% rise in Q2, 5.1% growth in Q1 and 4.9% growth in Q4 2012.
• Daily active users numbered 728 million, an increase of 4.1% from Q2. (Q2′s growth was 5.1%; Q1′s growth was 7.6%; and Q4′s was 5.8%.)
• Daily active users continue to grow at a faster clip than monthly active users on a year-over-year basis (24.7% vs. 18.1% in Q3).
• Advertising revenue in Q2 was $1.8 billion, accounting for 89.2% of total revenues, up from 88% in Q2 and 85% in Q1. Ad revenues grew by 12.4% quarter-over-quarter and by 65.6% year-over-year.
• Worldwide average revenue per user (ARPU) was $1.72, up from $1.60 in Q2, $1.35 in Q1 and $1.11 in Q3 2012. On a regional basis, ARPU topped out at $4.85 in the US and Canada, while growing in each region.