• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, October 26, 2016

Despite higher CPMs during the third quarter, brands making social media buys saw strong performance for both direct response and brand awareness campaigns, new research from Kinetic Social shows.

Overall, this resulted in a greater return on ad spend, the social-marketing services firm found.

Video continued to be emphasized across channels this past quarter, as it ties strongly to brand awareness campaign objectives. In fact, video view and brand awareness campaigns grew significantly across Facebook and Instagram, this past quarter.

Instagram ad spending has scaled to represent a full 20% of overall Facebook investment among Kinetic’s advertisers. Overall, the company continues to see mobile placements dramatically outperform desktop placements for both CPC and CPA metrics, though they continue to represent only about 60% of overall investment.

To make sense of this discrepancy, Kinetic notes that some advertisers continue to struggle with cross-device and cross-platform ROI measurement. Facebook ad spend by Kinetic’s clients increased by 50% quarter over quarter, with a slight rise in eCPMs.

Across all of the advertisers that Kinetic Social works with, the firm saw a 40% overall increase in ad spend from the second quarter to the third quarter of the year.

Across all industries, Canvas ads grew in popularity across many of the advertisers with which the firm works.

Kinetic also tested local awareness ads and dynamic ads for travel, which it said showed promising results.