Small Businesses Should Still Rely on Google and Facebook Ads, Report Reveals

According to the latest report from research firm eMarketer, Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) and Google (NASDAQ:GOOGL) are continuing to consolidate their hold on digital advertising. The firm says that total digital spending will increase by 16 percent this year to $83 billion. Google’s U.S. revenue from digital ads is expected to increase about 15 percent while Facebook’s is expected to jump 32 percent.

The Benefits of Google and Facebook Advertising

“Google’s dominance in search, especially mobile search, is largely coming from the growing tendency of consumers to turn to their smartphones to look up everything from the details of a product to directions,” eMarketer forecasting analyst Monica Peart said in a post. “Google and mobile search as a whole will continue to benefit from this behavioral shift.”

Google and Facebook have seemingly staked out their turf in the digital ads landscape. While Google is projected to continue to dominate the search ads space reaching 78 percent of U.S. search ad revenue in 2017, Facebook is king of display ads.  Facebook is projected to dominate an only slightly less impressive 39.1 percent of the U.S. digital display market.

The social networking site’s US display ad business is expected to grow to $16.33 billion in 2017. This obviously means that Facebook will take share away from Google, Yahoo, and Twitter.

Meanwhile, eMarketer projects that Microsoft’s US search ad revenues will increase from $2.79 billion this year to reach $3.02 billion in 2019. Snapchat, on the other hand, is poised for explosive growth as its revenue is expected to grow 157.8 percent to $770 million in the US. But even so, that is still slightly lower than the $800 million that had previously been projected.

Overall, search spending in the US is expected to increase by 24 percent over the next three years to reach $45.63 billion in 2019.

Going by these statistics, it is clear that while small businesses might look from time to time at other digital advertising services from the likes of Microsoft, Yahoo, Yelp, Amazon, Ask and AOL, Google remains the leader in search ads while Facebook remains the leader in digital display ads and small businesses can still rely on the two to reach a huge audience.

Google Ads Photo via Shutterstock

This article, "Small Businesses Should Still Rely on Google and Facebook Ads, Report Reveals" was first published on Small Business Trends