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Instagram Stories Ad Spend Grows 70%, Topping Facebook Stories' .3%

While advertisers continue flocking to Instagram Stories, Facebook Stories is not having the same effect among marketers.

That’s according to Socialbakers’ third-quarter trends report, which found that while Instagram Stories ad spend increased nearly 70%, year-over-year, Facebook Stories only saw a .3% increase during the same period.

Thanks to its growing popularity among brands, Instagram Stories now accounts for approximately 10% of all advertising revenue for Facebook, according to Socialbakers’ calculations.

Partly as a result, ads on Instagram continue to make up a larger share of its parent company’s overall ad revenue.

Specifically, from September 2018 until September 2019, ad spend on Instagram’s main Feed grew from 18% to 21% of the total share of spend, per Socialbakers.

That said, the majority of advertising investment (62.3%) still goes toward Facebook’s main Feed, according to the marketing firm.

Meanwhile, social commerce is continuing to emerge as a major trend, as brands offer more opportunities to purchase products directly from Instagram Facebook, and other platforms.

Comparing the second quarter to the third quarter, ecommerce grew by 118.3% on Instagram and 91.4% on Facebook.

“Our data show that the volume of shopping-related content is rapidly growing on social media, and platforms are responding by adding more ecommerce features,” Yuval Ben-Itzhak, CEO of Socialbakers, notes in the new report.

Instagram, for example, began offering in-app checkout for its shoppable posts, earlier this year.

On Instagram, ecommerce now makes up 15.8% of total interactions on the platform, which represents a 13.7% increase from the second quarter of the year.

On Facebook, ecommerce remains the top category -- increasing to 17.8% of interactions in the third quarter of the year.

Topping all other ecommerce categories, the fashion industry’s engagement increased from 27.8% in the second quarter to nearly a third of all interactions on the platform in the third quarter.
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