• by Gavin O'Malley , Staff Writer @mp_gavin, November 2, 2017

You wouldn’t know it by looking at Facebook’s latest earnings report, but retailers are pouring money into mobile video ads on the platform.

Yes, among Nanigans’ ad clients, spending on those types of units was up a whopping 40% from the third quarter of 2016 to the third quarter of this year.

This finding is all the more notable because Nanigans’ clients are mostly direct-response advertisers, and, historically, video has been associated with brand advertising.

Increasingly, however, direct-response advertisers -- ecommerce marketers especially -- are leveraging mobile video to drive new and repeat purchases.

Not surprisingly, the shift toward video ads is driving up CMPs on Facebook, which increased 57% among Nanigans clients, year-over-year. That spike resulted in an average of $9.31 during the third quarter.

Along with more expensive ads, the spike in video appears to be weighing down click-through rates.

Among Nanigans’ ecommerce clients, CTRs were down 4%, and 37% among gaming clients, year-over-year.

While they typically show stronger downstream returns on game downloads and in-app purchases, video ads do tend to result in relatively lower top-line click engagement.

More broadly, ecommerce ad spending across a same-advertiser set of Nanigans clients jumped 20%, year-over-year.

With advertisers using Nanigans already spending hundreds of millions of dollars on Facebook, year-over-grow growth of this size reflects substantially greater investment by retailers.

Ever more remarkably, the share of ecommerce ad spend going to dynamic ads skyrocketed 284%, year-over-year.

Dynamic ads on Facebook have become a popular way for retailers to reach customers with targeted ads based on their past shopping behavior -- in real time and on any device.

Because dynamic ads can tap into a live product feed, they can optimize ads across an entire online catalog to promote more attractive offers to individual shoppers.