Ad Spend

The term 'Ad Spend' describes the total dollar amount that companies, brands, or individuals plow into the paid advertising campaigns they run on platforms that sit at the intersection of social media and the web. These platforms—Facebook, Instagram, Twitter (now X), LinkedIn, TikTok, and plenty of others—provide tent-pole financial support for their parent companies by serving as vehicles for not only promotional content, but also paid-for content that looks and feels just like the 'organic' stuff that users post. Ad Spend seems to cover everything from paying for boosted posts that people are likely to see to running display ads to using demographic, interest-based, or even geographic targeting to reach specific audiences.

And it mainly covers three pricing models that the platforms utilize: pay-per-click (PPC), cost-per-thousand impressions (CPM), and cost-per-acquisition (CPA). And the thing is, with digital marketing, if you want to play, you have to pay. In the social media world, Ad Spend is what pushes content out past the promoted/post heyday and into an audience's look-see.