Both Google and Facebook are poised for significant growth in the local digital advertising realm over the next few years.
The Rise of Digital Localization
Local digital advertising spend continues to rise rapidly, as a recent study by BIA Advisory Services revealed that both Google and its video-sharing platform YouTube are expected to grow their digital ad revenue by 42% from $19 billion this year to $27 billion by 2022.
To a smaller degree, Facebook is also positioned to increase its footprint in the local space. In fact, when combined with Google, the two digital giants currently account for 48% of all local digital advertising revenue, which includes traditional channels like print, television and radio.
“The local advertising marketplace has been significantly altered over the past five years with the growth of local advertising on Google, and to a lesser extent Facebook”, said Tom Buono, BIA CEO in a recent statement. “We’ve been tracking local advertising for over 30 years and have witnessed the decline of print advertising and now we see serious threats to local radio and TV.”
The Surge of New Functionality
BIA Advisory Services has also speculated that mobile advertising will be the fastest-growing segment. It is estimated that mobile’s market share will expand from 12.6% of local ad spend in 2018 to 19.2% by 2022.
Additional mobile ad tactics like click-to-call will be further leveraged by both consumers and advertisers over the next few years, with the firm projecting that 169 billion mobile calls will be made to businesses by 2020, and that the “natural handoff between engagement and phone calls” (such as click-to-call buttons) will be a significant contributor.
Other features such as click-to-map and geo-fencing are also expected to gain further traction and become a key tool for brands and advertisers to utilize.
Leveraging the Mobile Advantage
As local advertising spend continues to soar into the future, it may become easy to get into the mindset that competition will undoubtedly grow stronger. And while that’s certainly true, there are opportunities to be found in several different areas that can give your campaigns a competitive advantage.
Mobile as a whole continues to show promising signs of maturation from the consumer perspective. Experiment by shifting additional budget to mobile-only traffic, especially if your desktop campaigns have been stagnating.
A richer opportunity may be found by going even further down the mobile pipeline. Click-to-call and click-to-map are considered to be very underutilized right now, which means running campaigns that get customers to use these actions could be the driving factor that accelerates your revenue gains.
Regardless, with growth comes opportunity, and it’s a great time to start running some new tests with your targeting.
If you have any questions about mobile offers, or if you’d like to learn more about our highest converting offers, reach out to your account manager today and they’ll be happy to help you maximize your success!