My quest continues for a firm answer to the question... what is happening in the FB/IG auction? I know a lot of people out there (particularly the research analyst types) are trying to roughly gauge the impact on spend on the recent reporting & attribution changes. I set out to answer that question by looking at spend trends YTD for Thesis clients + other accounts I have access to as an advisor.
For this analysis, I looked at the combined spend by week of 161 unique ad accounts that spent in total $187m YTD. These ad accounts totaled roughly $97m in spend in Q1, which I believe (I really hope my math isn't wrong here) is roughly ~.4% of the $25.4 billion in ad revenue FB reported in the first quarter. My data is very much skewed to US focused companies and it's further skewed heavily to D2C, and lead gen/home services. For the record, I didn't attempt to control for the impact of holidays (ex: Father's Day) and I didn't weight the results in any way.
I fully appreciate that this is not a perfect data set but I think it's good enough to be somewhat representative of the D2C space at least. And so without further ado...
Spend peaked during the week of 4-18 to 4-24, which lines up pretty closely with the iOS14.5 release date which I believe was April 26. We've seen spend decrease a bit since that peak but it's still very much in line with the prior weeks of the year. This data is very far from a doomsday sort of scenario.
