Tinuiti Report: Temu Takes a Break
Somebody must have given Temu a talking to.
The e-commerce brand that offers very competitively priced items was glomming up ad inventory across social media throughout 2023 to the consternation of its competitors. And then, just like that… it receded.
Temu, which increased its ad spending a whopping 1,000% in 2023 from the previous year and spent bigly in the 2024 Super Bowl, ceded search-ad spending in Q1 to Amazon, according to Tinuiti’s Q1 2024 Digital Ads Benchmark Report. “Although Temu may have briefly rivaled Amazon in the number of retailers seeing each as a top competitor for Google shopping impressions, Temu has consistently trailed Amazon by a wide margin in the share of Google shopping impressions each actually receives,” the report noted.
Tinuiti manages more than $4 billion in annual digital ad spend for platforms like Amazon, Facebook, Google, Instagram, and YouTube.
“At the highest point, 90% of retailers running Google shopping ads saw Temu as one of their top competitors in Google’s Auction Insights report,” the report said. “At the end of Q1 2024, that had dropped to 65%.” Even as Temu matched Amazon in the number of retailers each was a top competitor for, Amazon received more total impressions on Google. Amazon remained dominant with a 63% share of shopping impressions compared to Temu’s 17% in Q1.
The report said that overall, paid social-media advertising showed robust growth compared to other media platforms. TikTok’s popularity is evident—it has 150 million users in the U.S. alone—and brands increased their ad spending on TikTok 21% year-over-year. Spending on what can fairly be called a “legacy” social-media company, Meta ad buys on Instagram and Facebook fluctuated.
Although Facebook accounts for most of the ad investments in Meta, its share dropped from 72% to 69% compared to Q1 2023. But spending on Instagram rose from 27% last Q1 to 30% in Q1 2024. Instagram had a 34% year-over-year increase in ad spending, which was the highest among the platforms in the Tinuiti report. And the fastest growing of the major digital platforms for the fifth consecutive quarter.
