The numbers are in! Which advertising platform was most popular? When was the highest ad spend? Get the answers here with our review of how UK ecommerce companies distributed their ad spend this year.
Meta, which includes Facebook and Instagram, is online retailers’ advertising platform of choice, with a decisive 65% of spend. However, this has dropped across the year – from 70.5% in January to 60.9% in November.
While 60.9% is still a significant share of spend, it will be interesting to see how spend is affected during 2023 and whether this decline continues.
TikTok now boasts over 1 bn users, and ecommerce businesses are starting to take note and up their spending. According to our data, TikTok advertising has seen significant growth over 2022 and has become the UK’s third most popular platform for ecommerce ads.
On the Juni platform, TikTok’s overall market share is 4.3%, which peaked in July (10.1% of overall spend) and June (8.7%). This growth overtook more established platforms like Amazon (1.4%), Pinterest (0.5%) and Snap (0.4%). However, as we close out 2022, spend on TikTok is starting to drop.
Google has had an inconsistent year when it comes to ad spend. Starting the year strong at 22.8% in January and growing further to a high of 26.4% in May, spend dropped to a low of 16.4% in August. Since then, figures have recovered, climbing to 25% in November, suggesting a resurgence during key retail moments.
Retail Media Networks, launched by the likes of Asda, Boots and Tesco, were created to target shoppers who were already in the mindset to purchase. Despite predictions that they would revolutionise the UK advertising landscape, our data shows that social media platforms still play a key part in the overall campaign mix.
In November, British online retailers focused 61.3% of their monthly budget on advertising, a 167% increase on January’s ad spend level. And that’s not all!
November saw the highest advertising spend of 2022, claiming 16% of the year’s total investment so far (second week 4.7%, third week 4.2% and fourth week 3.6%). This is no surprise, as Singles Day, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the start of Gifting Season make November an important month for ecommerce sales. April (12%) and May (10.5%) follow November as spending peaks too.
As Gifting Season continues and New Year sales are around the corner, we predict that Holiday ad investment in December will be slightly above November's. The current leading platforms for December ad spend are Meta (68%), Google(28%) and TikTok (1.8%).
2023 is set to be an unpredictable year, so planning ahead will give you the advantage to start the year prepared.
“In early 2022, we launched credit to help UK ecommerce companies fund ad campaigns to unlock revenue growth. We’re seeing high levels of ad spend across our platform, with our data showing where and when online retailers are choosing to invest their marketing budgets, ” said Samir El-Sabini, CEO and Co-Founder of Juni.
“It's clear that companies have been testing what the best platforms are for them during certain key retail moments. As we enter 2023 amid a challenging economic climate, where businesses choose to spend their marketing budget will be brought into even sharper focus. It will be important to become more selective than ever on brand and channel investments. To sustain growth next year, businesses will need to manage a balancing act of the right mix of online and offline marketing and distribution.”
To learn more about optimising your online ad spend, check out our actionable tips here.
Instead of dealing with different platforms and currencies, receipts and invoices, and arguing with banks over spend limits, you can make running ads easier with Juni. With automatic receipt generation, real-time spend insights and Google Ads invoices auto-pulled into your account, it's simple to keep track of your payments.
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Methodology
The data used is based on a sample of 130 UK ecommerce companies using Juni’s platform.
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