• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, July 28, 2016

Facebook is preparing to enter the search advertising business supported by the company's more than 2 billion daily searches. During the company's second-quarter earnings call with analysts and investors, CEO Mark Zuckerberg called out three stages of the strategy.

While Phase One focused on building out Knowledge Graph search, the second phase aimed to make search useful to businesses. The third will focus using advertising to make from those searches. Not just Facebook, but for businesses and publishers that advertiser on Facebook's platform.

Today, Zuckerberg believes Facebook sits firmly in the second phase, which he describes as the ability to search for people, pages and groups.

Although he did not mention Messenger in the plan, no doubt the third phase Zuckerberg describes will tie into Messenger, with "1 billion organic interactions between businesses and consumers each month."

In a report released earlier this week — Kenshoo Digital Marketing Snapshot: Q2 2016 — numbers describe the impact that mobile, product-focused, and video ad types have on paid social and search advertising.

Kenshoo said that among its clients, marketers spent 47% more on social ads in the second quarter of 2016 compared with the year-ago quarter. The results are based on 550 billion impressions, 11 billion clicks and $6 billion spent during five quarters. The performance data managed on the Kenshoo platform from more than 3,000 advertiser and agency accounts across 20 vertical industries and 60 countries.

The study attributes growth to the 92% uptick of spend on smartphones and tablets, which now make up 64% of the total.

In search, spending on smartphone ads rose 63% and product ads grew by 71%, leading to a total increase in search spending of 10% year-over-year.