Similarweb Social Media Advertising Market Update: December 2022

Snapchat builds momentum, while Facebook shows greatest loss of traffic share

Similarweb’s latest Snapshot of the social media ad market shows Snapchat gaining momentum, with traffic to ads.snapchat.com up nearly 30% year-over-year in December. That’s even more than TikTok, which has been the growth champion to beat.

Other metrics that stand out include:

• While Snapchat’s ad portal grew traffic by 28.37% year-over-year, ads.pinterest.com was down almost the same amount, 24.95%.
• Snapchat also grew its share of traffic within this peer group, while Pinterest and Facebook both dropped their share on a year-over-year basis.
• Between November and December, Snapchat’s ad portal traffic increased by 33.9%, while traffic to ads.tiktok.com was down 30.8% and Pinterest’s was down 20.43%.

We watch web traffic to these ad-buying portals as an early indicator of company growth and revenue.

Visits to Ad Portals

Of course, while momentum is important, size still matters. Facebook parent Meta uses Facebook’s business subdomain for serves multiple purposes, including organic social media posts by businesses as well as advertising across Facebook, Instagram, and other properties. The Facebook business portal is far larger than the ad portals of its competitors. Snapchat has less than 2% as much traffic and even TikTok, which Facebook has treated as a competitive threat, gets just a little over 3% as much ad-buying traffic.

All these statistics are measures of the social site’s ad-buying traffic, not its consumer traffic.

Share of Traffic

Despite Facebook’s size advantage, Meta’s leaders clearly have reasons to worry about the erosion in their share of traffic. Facebook showed the biggest loss in share of any domain in this peer group.

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Report By: David F. Carr, Senior Insights Manager

Methodology

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