X (Ex-Twitter) and Facebook Ad Traffic Down About 10.5% in July

Meanwhile, Snapchat, TikTok, and Pinterest gain 190.6%, 71.4%, and 41.4%, respectively, year-over-year

Following a long-term pattern more than any recent developments (Twitter becomes X! Threads launches!), two of the most established social networks continued to see traffic to their business portals drop, while competitors made gains.

Key takeaways

• Traffic to the business.facebook.com and traffic to ads.twitter.com portals where ads can be purchased dropped by 10.5% and 10.6% year-over-year, respectively, according to Similarweb estimates. Advertisers use that same Facebook portal to buy ads on Instagram and other Meta properties, as well as to post organic content. X (the social network formerly known as Twitter) continues to do business through the twitter.com domain, and the ads portal is as yet untouched by the rebrand.
• Facebook and X did see month-over-month traffic gains, or 4.2% and 17.6%, respectively. However, most of their competitors saw larger gains, with Pinterest up 55.3% and TikTok up 46%. Snapchat also increased ad portal traffic by 12.7%.
• A trailing 12-month analysis shows that over the past year, Twitter’s ad portal has lost 14.9% of its traffic compared to the previous year. Facebook has dropped by 7.6%, while Snapchat is up 100%, TikTok is up 40%, and Pinterest is up 17.9%.

We track traffic to the social media ad-buying portals as a topline indicator of businesses interest in transacting with these companies. That interest doesn’t always translate into revenue – for example, Snapchat’s ad traffic numbers have tended to outdistance Snap Inc. financial results – but it shows the potential audience for these companies’ services.

Facebook and X keep losing, but Snapchat and TikTok are gaining even more

Here’s how the ad portals stack up in terms of total traffic, an indicator of demand.

Although Facebook is the biggest, like X it continues to suffer from year-over-year comparisons.

The longer-term trend is much the same

If we compare a trailing 12-month total of traffic to these sites to the total from a year earlier, we see almost the same pattern of Facebook and Twitter shrinking while others, particularly Snapchat and TikTok, have been drawing more advertiser interest.

Traffic was up from June to July

All the websites discussed here grew traffic, month-over-month, although some did dramatically better.

Note that although the long-term trend for X is negative, it actually gained advertiser interest as measured by visits to the ad portal from June 2023 to July 2023 despite (or because of?) owner Elon Musk’s abrupt decision to rebrand it from Twitter to X in late July.

Public companies mentioned in this report include Meta Platforms Inc. (NASDAQ: META), Pinterest (NYSE: PINS), and Snapchat parent Snap (NYSE: SNAP).

The Similarweb Insights & Communications team is available to pull additional or updated data on request for the news media (journalists are invited to write to press@similarweb.com). When citing our data, please reference Similarweb as the source and link back to the most relevant blog post or similarweb.com/blog/insights/.

Methodology

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by David F. Carr

David covers social media, digital advertising, and generative AI. With a background in web trends since the 1990s, he’s also the author of "Social Collaboration for Dummies".