Mediarun Search Marketing News

Facebook challenges Google for website marketing spend

February 22th 2010

Universal Search Marketing News

Facebook is challenging Google as the most popular spot for big brand advertising online.

According to New Media Age, brands including O2, Virgin Media and Vodafone are all ramping up website marketing spend on the social networking site as it proves itself to be a valuable channel for direct response advertising.

Facebook opened its application programming interface (API) to advertising agencies last year to give them greater control over website promotion campaigns.

New Media Age writer Charlotte McEleny notes that key accounts have already changed agencies as brands look to capitalise on this development.

The move has also increased direct response ad opportunities. Fiat was this week the first advertiser to use Facebook's new sampling ad format, which asks users to input their address to receive information, samples or vouchers from a brand.

PayPal was also recently made available in Facebook's advertising and developer systems, making it easier for advertisers to run website marketing campaigns on Facebook.

Sonia Sudhakar, head of online marketing at Virgin Media, said the company was beginning to shift ad spend to Facebook in place of other, more established direct response display channels.

"We've definitely increased spend on Facebook. We used to do a lot of blind network buys but with Facebook you can go directly through the social network," she said.

Ifan Jenkins, senior brand manager at Carlsberg, added that Facebook was now a workable platform for online ads.

"We're about to advertise on Facebook for the first time," he explained.

Figures published last week by the sharing network Gigya show Facebook is now the most popular channel for sharing online content.

And with the social networking site placed ahead of both Google and Twitter, Facebook's reputation as a brand building bedrock seems to be growing.