Thanks To Social, Advertisers Plan To Spend More Programmatically In 2016 [Report]

More than two-thirds of marketers said they plan to increase their investment in programmatic advertising in 2016, according to AdRoll’s annual State of the Industry Report, which looks at programmatic and digital attribution trends.

Considering how many platforms now support programmatic ad buying — including Google, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram — this stat isn’t shocking. But the pace at which advertisers are shifting the bulk of their ad budgets to programmatic is certainly noteworthy.

According to AdRoll’s report, one-third of US marketers (32 percent) allocated more than half of their ad spend to programmatic ad buying in 2015. That’s up from just 14 percent of marketers who said the same in 2014 and a paltry seven percent who said so in 2013.

Social advertising leads all other channels in programmatic investment, with display and mobile coming in second and third, respectively.

Mobile Retargeting Used By More Than 80 Percent Of Marketers

Retargeting on mobile has increased substantially in a year, the report shows. Of those surveyed, 82 percent said they are currently remarketing on mobile. That’s up from 54 percent in 2014, and 87 percent said they plan to increase spend on mobile retargeting in 2016.

Still, more than a quarter of respondents (27 percent) said their company still doesn’t have a mobile-optimized site. Ouch.

Muli-Touch Attribution Now Common, More Weight Given To VTCs

The report highlights some interesting trends in how companies are addressing attribution. Up from just 24 percent in 2014, 40 percent of marketers said they have moved beyond measuring based solely on last-click and have adopted multi-touch-point attribution models.

Somewhat surprising is that more marketers are giving more weight to view-through conversions. One-third of marketers said they attribute more than 50 percent weight to view-through conversions.

This trend may be due to more opportunities for advertisers to buy media on a viewable impression basis. Nearly half (48 percent) of respondents said viewability tracking is the future of attribution — beating out better multi-touch attribution and better technology for solving cross-device tracking issues.

AdRoll partnered with Qaltrics to survey 1,050 US marketers and advertisers for this report. The full report is available for download on the AdRoll site.