Facebook CPMs—the cost per thousand impressions—have increased significantly over the past year as digital ad spending has resurged and advertisers have flocked to the platform, driving more competition into programmatic auctions.

Social network ad spending has substantially rebounded since the early days of the pandemic. In 2021, the biggest issues social media marketers will face are in the areas of brand safety, ethics, and privacy.

Digital display ad CPMs run between $0.50 and $4, and social media CPMs go between $6 to $9, according to marketing agency Topdraw. But CTV ads have several other features that make them stand out compared with other ads. CTV ads can’t easily be blocked, scrolled past, or ignored. CTV has less clutter than the open web. In Q2, 96% of CTV ads were viewed through completion, per Extreme Reach.

When US advertisers pulled back spending dramatically in March, one of the earliest noticeable effects on the display ad market was falling CPMs. At the same time as marketers were lowering their demand for ads—either to take spending cuts as savings or merely pause and rework their messaging—consumers were spending more time on social and traditional media properties, increasing the supply of impressions. A decline in prices was the natural outcome.

Social media advertising will remain vulnerable in Q2 and possibly longer. CPMs will stay low, spending cuts will persist, and ad creative will be tricky to get right.

“I think there is something to be said for the CPM [cost-per-thousand] increase. It’s much more expensive than it was last year. There’s no question there,” said Avi Ben-Zvi, vice president of paid social at Tinuiti. But rising CPMs only account for a fraction of his increased Facebook spend year over year, Ben-Zvi added.

On today's episode, we discuss Twitter's major initiatives and figure out what the platform will look like after it reinvents itself. We then talk about Facebook's cost-per-thousand (CPM) recovery, TikTok's ecommerce efforts, and a recent study about COVID-19 news on Facebook. Tune in to the discussion with eMarketer senior analyst at Insider Intelligence Jasmine Enberg.

More importantly many advertisers don’t have the money now to buy the additional impressions, which has depressed CPMs. Adomik, which lets publishers track their ad monetization, released data this week that showed a 17.2% drop in week-over-week ad revenues in the US between March 10 to March 15 and March 17 to March 22. 

With the steady rise in mobile CPMs over the past few years, these lower rates have provided opportunities some advertisers didn’t have prior to the pandemic. Although social media CPMs and costs per click (CPCs) have recovered and even exceed some pre-pandemic prices over the past winter, they still lag behind prices from a year ago.

Despite how consumers feel about it, politics remains a core part of the social media experience. This report explores how marketers should navigate social in the aftermath of the 2020 US presidential election.

Social media is a case in point. Socialbakers reported that CPMs and CPCs fell across all industries and social media platforms. CPMs fell from a recent high of $1.88 in late November to $0.81 in late March. Although part of this drop is seasonal, the majority is related to the coronavirus. CPCs also dropped 19% from a previous low of $0.11 in early January to $0.09 most recently.

Stories are hardly a new social media format—they are nearly 8 years old on Snapchat and almost 5 on Instagram. But they are still heavily used for social media marketing, even as short-video platforms like TikTok have taken off.

A May 2020 survey of 173 US ad sellers by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) found that podcasting CPMs had declined 6% due to the pandemic. Meanwhile, CPMs for streaming video, social media, and display were down a much greater degree. Another reason why podcast ad spending may grow amid the pandemic is that podcasts are coming into their own as an advertising medium.

Widespread dependence on third-party keyword blocking technologies has led to the blocklisting of legitimate publishers and unnecessary limitations on the flow of ad spend to their platforms, while constraining available supply and artificially inflating CPMs on the remaining inventory.

They are one of the last remaining ways to reliably drive traffic off social media platforms, via a swipe-up feature that opens a web link directly within the Story. Not every social media platform offers this feature, but most do, and these links play an integral role in driving leads, conversions, and social commerce transactions.

Facebook CPMs—the cost per thousand impressions—have increased significantly over the past year as digital ad spending has resurged and advertisers have flocked to the platform, driving more competition into programmatic auctions. On core Facebook (excluding FAN), CPMs rose 47% in Q3 2021 versus Q3 2020—and +33% versus Q3 2019, according to data provided by performance marketing agency Tinuiti.