New research highlights digital advertising insights

A new market update released by Similarweb, a digital intelligence platform, has highlighted the changing digital advertising trends on social media for December 2022.

The update highlighted the five major social media companies (Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok and Pinterest) and monitored the traffic to ad-buying portals for these companies. Similarweb uses this traffic as an early indicator of company growth and revenue. 

Similarweb also acknowledges that these statistics are measures of the social site's ad-buying traffic, not its consumer traffic.

Of the five social media companies, the company that Similarweb found received the most visits to its ad portal year-over-year in December 2022 was, unexpectedly, Snapchat. 

Snapchat's ad portal visits grew 28.37% year-over-year in December 2022, becoming far and away the biggest receiver of ad portal visits compared to its competitors.

This is in stark contrast to Pinterest's ad portal visits, which fell -24.95%, almost the opposite of Snapchat.

Facebook's ad portal covers all the apps under its banner, including Facebook, Instagram and other properties. Similarweb's research found that Facebook's ad portal received fewer visits year-over-year in December 2022, with a drop of -4.46%. 

As for Twitter and TikTok, both sites saw ad portal visits grow year-over-year, with a 4.21% growth for Twitter and a 10.22% growth for TikTok.

Overall, there was a -3.86% change in visits to ad portals year-over-year in December 2022.

When looking at the change in visits month-over-month for December 2022, there are a few differences.

Both Snapchat and Pinterest showed similar growth and decline, with Snapchat's ad portal visits growing 33.9%, while Pinterest's declined -20.43%.

Similarweb witnessed almost no change in Twitter's ad portal visits month-over-month in December 2022, with a slight growth of only 0.58%.

Facebook also showed a decrease in ad portal visits, dropping -1.12%. This outcome is despite Facebook having much larger ad portal traffic compared to its competitors. Snapchat's ad portal only receives less than 2% as much traffic as Facebook.

The most interesting outcome, however, is what happened to TikTok's month-over-month ad portal visits in December 2022. 

As one of the largest growing platforms in the world, the assumption that TikTok's ad portal visits would also maintain the company's momentum would be a logical stance. Yet, according to Similarweb, TikTok's month-over-month ad portal visits for December 2022 declined, and not by a small amount, -30.79%. 

This is interesting when comparing it to Facebook, which has treated TikTok as a competitive threat, despite TikTok only receiving about 3% of Facebook ad portal traffic.

Overall, there was a -2.2% change in visits to ad portals month-over-month in December 2022.

The last area looked at by Similarweb was the year-over-year traffic share of ad portals in December 2022. 

Snapchat, Twitter and Pinterest all had changes similar to their ad portal visits. Snapchat again has the most considerable growth, Twitter has a very slight increase, and Pinterest steadily declines. However, there are interesting insights about TikTok and Facebook.

TikTok's year-over-year traffic share of ad portals in December 2022 grew substantially, almost the same as Snapchat's.

Unfortunately for Facebook, however, its share of ad portal visits year-over-year in December 2022 showed the most significant loss in share of any domain in this peer group.