Let’s see what this week’s numbers say about online advertising, shall we?
- Walmart’s ambitions to be a major advertising player are continuing to grow. The retailer reported global ad business growth of 26% year-over-year during the second quarter of its financial year 2025 earnings. Within the U.S., Walmart’s ad business, called Walmart Connect, saw 30% year-over-year growth during the quarter.
- Starting on September 9, 2024, Google Ads API users will no longer need to wait 24 hours before uploading conversion adjustments – they can be uploaded immediately after the original conversion has been uploaded or recorded by Google tags. This means that you will no longer need to keep track of the 24-hour window before uploading conversion adjustments, and can stop checking for certain error codes and retrying those upload requests.
- B2B tech firms are upping the ante with their content marketing, according to a recent report from 10Fold. With 91% reporting an increase in content budgets, 92% have expanded the amount of content they’ve created, per the findings. Based on a survey of 450 marketing decision-makers from B2B and B2B2C tech companies across the US, Canada, France, Germany and the UK, 10Fold finds that respondents are getting a hand along the way: 81% use artificial intelligence (AI) either frequently (36%) or occasionally (45%) to generate content. Indeed, recent research shows that content creation is currently the leading use case for AI by B2B firms. Aside from AI, marketers are also turning to outside help, as 57% plan to outsource at least half of their content creation this year. This appears to be a winning strategy, as 82% report above-average to excellent quality for their externally-generated content. The upshot is that the frequency with which B2B tech marketers are publishing content is on the rise.
- Meta will nab a far bigger share of US digital ad spend (21.3%) than YouTube (5.6%) or Netflix (0.3%) this year, despite accounting for a nearly equal share of US time spent with digital, according to our June 2024 forecast. Despite gripes from users about the increasing number of ads on its platforms like Instagram, Meta reported that Q2 usage was on the upswing. The number of users across Meta’s apps grew 7%, while impressions and price per ad each grew 10%. In contrast, connected TV (CTV) spend on platforms like Netflix and YouTube—where consumers also spend a considerable amount of digital time—isn’t keeping up with the consumer shift from linear to digital. Meta has built an outsized ad spend share by facilitating trackable ROI and easy ad placements. Meanwhile on CTV, the ad industry has been slow to meet consumer time spent.
