Dive Brief:

• Findings from Facebook IQ research announced in a company news post indicate reliance on mobile is increasing for the upcoming holiday season, and mobile-first shopping is up 18% in the U.S. and 56% from 2015.
• Because Facebook found 30% of mobile shoppers prefer to discover new products through video it is rolling out video for dynamic ads allowing marketers to upload product-level videos in dynamic ads instead of only static images through the Facebook API or the asset manager. It’s also introducing a new household audience targeting option that lets marketers deliver messages to family members in the same household to influence purchase decisions of products and services as well as new household measurement metrics.
• In separate Facebook news, the platform has reached 2 billion monthly users, as reported by TechCrunch. The user figure compares to 1.5 billion for YouTube, 889 million for WeChat, 328 million for Twitter and an estimated 255 million for Snapchat. Facebook’s other platforms include 1.2 billion for messaging apps WhatsApp and Messenger, and Instagram recently passed 700 million users.

Dive Insight:

Facebook’s new tools and advertising options fall squarely into its plan and expectation to continue to become a mobile- and video-centric platform. And while mobile-first shopping is growing faster than desktop, overall e-commerce sales are still a small portion of total sales. At the same time, similar to the early days of e-commerce and online banking, consumers are overcoming a reluctance to both start and end a shopping experience on mobile devices.

Over the past few years, Google has turned shopping ads into a lucrative business and Facebook is clearly making a play to better compete for these advertising dollars by adding video to dynamic ads, which pull from merchants' product catalogs. YouTube offers shopping ads in videos and Instagram is ramping up shopping ads, although video is not currently available. 

Made.com is an early adopter of Facebook's new dynamic ads with video, and Airbnb and Netflix are both taking advantage of household marketing. Airbnb is interested in the new targeting because travel decisions are often made by multiple members of a household, said Alok Gupta, Data Science Manager, Airbnb, in the news post.

Facebook’s research on mobile-first shoppers found they are 1.72x more likely to get gift inspirations on Facebook and 2.51x more likely on Instagram. Facebook also found that parents were more than 50% of mobile-first shoppers last year and expects that trend to grow.