• by Gavin O'Malley , Staff Writer @mp_gavin, January 24, 2019

For Facebook, Stories is the gift that keeps on giving.

Over the past year, Nanigans’ ad clients increased budgets dedicated to the mobile format by 124%, on average. Additionally, among advertisers using Nanigans’ software, video ad formats continued to own the majority of ad spend on Facebook.

For Stories, click-through rates, CPMs, and cost-per clicks also enjoyed significant year-over-year increases, according to the Facebook-focused ad platform.

Indeed, CTRs increased 52% from fourth quarter 2017 to 2018; CPMs jumped 112%; and CPCs grew by a 39%.

Of course, News Feed (not including Stories) remains responsible for the majority of ad spending among Nanigans’ customers.

In the fourth quarter of 2018, advertisers reported that 61% of overall ad budgets went to video ads, with the rest going to image-based ads.

In general, video ads tend to raise CPMs and lower CTRs, Nanigans finds. Continued investment in video would suggest the ROI from video ads is increasingly making up for the higher CPMs and lower CTRs.

Overall, click-through rates on Facebook experienced a roller-coaster ride last year.

After dipping by 9% from the second to the third quarters, global click-through rates in the fourth returned to second-quarter levels.

The global CTR average of 1.5% represented a 12.3% increase, quarter-over-quarter, and a 11.6% increase, year-over-year.

Nanigans attributed the rise in click engagement to the effectiveness of dynamic ads in delivering clicks at scale across Facebook’s user base.

CTRs for marketers choosing app installs as their objective increased by 3% from the third to fourth quarters in 2018 -- averaging 0.55%.

For lead gen companies, CTRs were up 15%, which Nanigans attributed to a captive audience during the holiday season.

Also, CTRs for transaction-focused marketers dipped 2% from the fourth quarters of 2017 to 2018, although they remained markedly higher than CTRs for app installers, lead gen advertisers and the global average.

The CTR for transaction-driven companies was 2.34%, compared to the global average of 1.5%.