In your planning meetings for determining your media budgets for the quarter, you may have run into the following common questions:

• Buying ads programmatically is not a new concept, but have marketers adopted this method for video?

• Twitter has been making headlines recently; is it still a good advertising channel?

• Facebook custom audiences have existed for several years now, but how effective is CRM-powered targeting versus traditional methods?

Our top three advertising insights for this week answer these exact questions.

Nearly all marketers are buying some form of programmatic ads, but programmatic digital video ad spend is on the rise. The chart below (left) by eMarketer shows that programmatic display ads now make up a majority of all digital display ads in the U.S. The adoption of programmatic video ads, on the other hand, is starting to explode. Programmatic digital video ad spending made up 39% of total U.S. digital video ad spend last year amounting to $2.91 billion according to eMarketer (right). This is an increase of 363%! The total amount of U.S. digital video ad spend bought programmatically is projected to rise to 65% of the total spend by 2017. Facebook and Instagram are great platforms for video content, so leverage these programmatic channels in your next campaign if you haven’t already!

Twitter is also great channel to buy ads programmatically, particularly for CRM-powered ads focused on your customers and the people who talk about your products. Twitter's ad revenue will grow by 96% to $4 billion over the next two years according to eMarketer. Marketers are learning that Twitter enables identity-based advertising, that is, using Twitter Tailored Audiences to target known customers using the interactions and information from your CRM data. For example, you could use social listening to find positive conversations happening about the topics related to your brand, product, and/or service and then target those people with a relevant ad. Or you could target recent purchasers of a particular product with an ad to up sell the customer on a related item.

In the Salesforce Advertising Index report for Q3 2015, we divided all campaigns targeting people in the United States that drove clicks to websites into three major targeting types:

• Traditional demographic targeting: ads targeted by things including age, gender, and interests

• Lookalike audience targeting: ads targeted to the people on Facebook who are the most similar to a CRM-based list of your own customers

• Custom Audience targeting: ads targeted to a specific group of people on Facebook selected through a CRM-based list of your own customers

The Custom Audience targeted Clicks to Website Ads on Facebook had 27% higher engagement, as measured by CTR, than traditional demographic targeting, and lookalike audience ads had a 7% higher engagement. Traditional targeting had a lower CPM than Custom Audiences as it usually targets a much wider audience. Use CRM-powered ads to drive higher engagement for your programmatic campaigns!

You can find more data insights on Facebook video ads, Twitter promoted tweets, and targeting Facebook custom audiences in our most recent advertising index. Download the report today!