Retailers and brands must advertise if they want visibility, as half as many consumers are seeing a brand’s Facebook posts as saw them a year ago, according to the latest Adobe Digital Index.

If a brand wants its Facebook posts to be seen by many consumers, it better be ready to pay to promote them using the social network’s Promoted Posts ad unit, according to the new Adobe Digital Index.

The report, which is based on data gathered from thousands of Adobe Systems Inc.’s retail clients, found that the percentage of shoppers who see a brand’s typical Facebook post is half what it was a year ago. That continues a shift by Facebook to limit the percentage of shoppers who see unpromoted posts. While 16.0% of a brand’s fans saw a brand’s post in February 2012, that percentage fell to 10.2% in November 2013 and 6.5% in March 2014, according to Edgerank Checker.

Meanwhile, paid impressions on Facebook are up 5% compared to the previous year, which shows that marketers are paying to boost the visibility of certain posts. Adobe expects that spending to grow significantly in the fourth quarter, says Joe Martin, senior analyst, Adobe Digital Index.

“As social becomes a bigger part of the holiday commerce experience, brands and retailers are going to want to make sure their messaging is being seen,” he says.

Part of the reason behind Facebook limiting the number of posts a user sees is to curate the news feed, because brands are posting a lot more often to the platform. Retailers posted 43% more often to Facebook than they did a year earlier. And consumers are increasingly interacting with those posts; interactions, including comments, Likes and shares, are up 13% compared to the third quarter a year earlier.

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While aggregate shopper engagement with brands is up on Facebook, that doesn’t mean more consumers are clicking through to retailers’ sites. In fact, the percentage of shoppers clicking from Facebook to retail sites dipped 3% year over year. Conversely, the percentage of shoppers clicking from Twitter to a retail site grew 52% compared to the same period a year ago.

The report also found that marketers boosted their search spending 22% in the third quarter. However, much of that increase came in Europe, where advertisers spent 32% more in the third quarter than they did a year earlier. U.S. marketers increased their search spending 4%.

Google continues to perform well for marketers, the report suggests. The search giant refers more than 25% of all browser visits to sites in the United States.  And its click-through rate growth, up 14% year over year, is also higher than that of rivals Yahoo and Bing (Adobe’s report combines the two), which grew 8%. Moreover, Google had a lower cost-per-click increase, up 4%, compared with Yahoo/Bing, which increased 12%. Microsoft Corp.’s Bing provides search results for Yahoo and Microsoft sites.

Even so, Yahoo/Bing is driving more high-quality traffic to sites than Google. For example, retailers’ revenue per visit from Bing-referred traffic outpaces Google, as well as social networks, which is why Adobe’s Martin suggests it offers a ripe opportunity for marketers.

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“We think marketers should optimize campaigns on Bing first so they are getting the higher-quality traffic, and then move to Google for the bulk of the traffic,” he says.

 

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