Social media platforms come and go.

Social media ad spending in the U.S has jumped $6.3 billion from last year and is projected to reach $88.3 billion in 2026. While these are impressive forecasts, only 24% of users spend time on social media platforms.

Social media usage is a trend that has reached its peak and is slowly declining. If users are spending less time browsing social platforms, then where are they? On average, users spend three hours on social media and nine plus hours on the internet streaming music and podcasts, playing video games, reading articles, and watching TV. Many 'trendy' social media platforms have peaked and passed, such as Vine and MySpace. The same can happen to the current social platforms.

Unlike social media, the internet is never going away.

Recently it has become a trend for users to take 'social media breaks', but you don't hear about users taking internet breaks. The internet is constantly being used, especially to make purchasing decisions. In 2021, 230.5 million U.S online shoppers browsed products, compared prices, or bought online merchandise at least once.

El Toro knows how crucial it is to get as many eyeballs on your ad as possible. Still, with users taking social media breaks or ditching it altogether, you could potentially be wasting valuable ad spending on audiences that are not there. Displaying ads on platforms most used, such as the open web and streaming platforms, is key for optimizing your leads generated and conversion rates.

Likes or shares can't prove ROI.

Even though social media ads effectively generate brand awareness and get a company's name out there, they lack in driving conversions for several reasons: no clear target audience, lack of reader urgency, and lack of performance tracking. Recent studies involving CTRs on Facebook ads have shown no correlation between CTR and ROI. This is proven even further as nearly 76% of businesses that advertise on Facebook are not profiting from those ads and don't even know it.

Social media offers no clear target audience making it challenging to deliver personalized ads. This can lead to your ads being delivered to users who don't care about your products or services, ultimately aggravating the heck out of them. There is also a lack of reader urgency for social media ads as users rarely stop to read any piece of content without good reason. Most importantly, there's a lack of performance tracking for social media ads, making it difficult to track one-to-one conversions throughout a campaign. Advertising on social media is a type of visibility marketing that is the least direct and least efficient method around. 

To find out more about how El Toro's revolutionary and patented advertising technology can help you better optimize your digital marketing strategies, reach out to our team today.

Data: Broadband Search