• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, February 2, 2017

While Facebook's mobile strategy represented 84% of its $8.81 billion in revenue from advertisements during the fourth quarter of 2016 -- up from 80% in the year-ago quarter -- not all attribute the increase solely to mobile. The profit climbed, nearly tripling, to $2.06 billion.

Some point to the political climate and human behavior as contributing factors. "Clients are calling it the 'Trump effect," Tim Daly, CEO at Vincodo, wrote in an email to Search Marketing Daily. "People are so tired of the politics in their stream, they are engaging with ads at the highest rates we’ve seen in years on Facebook. Click rate up, conversion rates up. Terrific performance across the board."

In fact, Daly sees "huge" increases across all clients. Triple-digit growth in some cases, especially for remarketing advertisements. Some are asking to put the brakes on.

"I have multiple clients asking us to slow down spend on Facebook and put in caps for first time on remarketing efforts because it is too much traffic," he wrote in an email. 

The return on investments seems consistent with volumes up anywhere from 20% to 100% year on year, he explained. Click rates on advertisements improved as well by an average of 40%. In fact, he said, the company's seeing its best month ever for clients. 

Facebook members want to keep up with news from friends and family, but more are clicking on ads as a distraction to avoid the political rhetoric in feeds since U.S. President Donald Trump won the election. 

In the race to capture more advertising dollars, the ability for friends and family to share news in social streams remains a weak point for Google.

Statista estimates that 1.15 billion mobile users visit Facebook on an average daily basis, and that number has climbed steadily from about 750 million in 2014. "The pace at which mobile ads have become the single driver of the company's growth is noteworthy though," Felix Richter, data journalist at Statista, wrote in a report published Thursday.

Even more impressive, Pivotal Research senior analyst Brian Wieser points out in a published note that, "as a percentage of global digital advertising for the full year Facebook’s $27bn in ad revenue accounted for 18% of the world’s total outside of China (or 36% of non-search advertising outside of China)."