Social Ad Spending Not Keeping Up With User Hype

A recent study by JupiterResearch reports that half of all advertisers are spending less than 5% of their online budgets on social media ads in 2008, which is a much smaller chunk of the pie compared to Search and Display. Larger marketers have been the most hesitant in getting more involved with advertising on Social Media due to challenges with measuring ROI and brand metrics.

Overall, marketers are still unclear on how to leverage this emerging channel and how to measure results. In addition, marketers have limited performance history to use as a comparison with the channel. Social Media publishers realize there are some issues, and are beginning to offer more tools to marketers to help ease any worries.

Social Media users are flocking to these sites, but that doesn’t equate to interaction with the ads. According to a recent MediaPost article, 54% of users never click on ads, 39% occasionally click on ads, and only 7% often respond to Social Ads.

As social media publishers like FaceBook and MySpace continue to offer more tools to advertisers to help them customize their campaigns, there should be a higher adoption of the channel and increased budgets should soon follow.