Study: More advertisers will choose Facebook video over YouTube this year

More marketers will use Facebook video for their ad campaigns than YouTube this year, according to a study released today.

The report, “The State of Video Advertising: Facebook’s Rise to Dominance,” was published by Mixpo, a company that helps publishers with their advertising plans. It said that this year, 87 percent of respondents to the survey said they planned on running video ads on Facebook, compared with 81.5 percent on YouTube.

Last year, for the first time, Facebook surpassed YouTube in overall video views. Now, says Mixpo, marketers will join everyday users — whose video posts on Facebook grew 94 percent in the U.S. year over year — in their preference for Facebook video.

Yet even as advertisers will be turning more to Facebook than YouTube this year, Mixpo argued, their use of social as a marketing platform doesn’t match the way everyday people use social.

Above: More advertisers plan on running campaigns with Facebook video this year than with YouTube.

Image Credit: Mixpo

“Even though over 80 percent of our respondents considered social advertising to be important or very important,” Mixpo wrote, “we’re still seeing a disproportionately low percentage of digital budgets going toward social compared to how much time users are spending in social (almost half of our respondents spend less than 10% of their digital media budget in social).”

The conclusion? That video advertising may help “close that gap.”

At the same time, Facebook’s knowledge about its users’ behavior may well be its biggest advantage over YouTube. Mixpo noted that Facebook ad retargeting works across multiple devices “without dependency on third-party cookies that expire or get deleted.” As well, Facebook offers “true attribution based on view through and/or click-through,” even on mobile. And, while Facebook understands its users, it doesn’t pass personal information about them to advertisers, “eliminating liability for privacy protection.”

In the study, Mixpo quoted Omnicom Digital CEO Jonathan Nelson as having said to Adweek, “When you have that much known information, tied to analytics and an ad server, you can start doing messaging in a way no one’s ever done before. That’s marketing nirvana.”

Facebook did not respond to a VentureBeat request for comment.