New figures from ComScore place Facebook firmly as the biggest online advertising platform in the UK.

The number of ads on Facebook is reported to have grown 33% in the last year.

The social media giant is reported to have served 19.7 billion ads in the UK during May this year – almost four times more than second-placed Microsoft.

Google Sites managed to reach third place on the list with its 2.68 billion ads, beating both eBay (2.71 billion) and Yahoo Sites (2.4 billion) by an inch.

However, the volume alone doesn’t necessarily reflect the effectiveness for the advertisers, Mark Redgrave, chief executive of semantic web service OpenAmplify, pointed out.

“The last year has been the first year advertising has really taken off on Facebook and I think advertising will increase by more than a third again in the next year,” he said. “But the key to the current growth is that it can only be measured in terms of volume, not value.

“Being there’s the easy bit, CPM rates are generally cheap, the hard bit comes when marketers try and fully engage. The technology now exists to really understand users based on conversations.”

Source: MediaWeek