Mobile ads help Facebook double Q4 profit

Facebook last week revealed another quarter of soaring revenue and profit for the last quarter of 2015, thanks to the popularity of mobile ads on its social networking platform.

The results come on the back of sales in Q4 2015 that rose 52% to $5.84 billion from a year ago, which contributed to profit increasing to $1.56 billion. The profit is more than double the $701 million from just a year ago.

Mobile ads made up 80% of the company’s total ad business for the fourth quarter of 2015 compared to just 23% in the same quarter in 2012.

“Our strategy is working and we have many more opportunities ahead,” said Mark Zuckerberg, who is back after taking two months to spend time with his newborn daughter. “So we’re going to continue investing to deliver more great results, over the long-term.”

The company now has 1.59 billion users that log into Facebook each month, which is likely to further boost the company’s sales and revenues in the months and years ahead.

Marketers are heading to Facebook due to its ability to get well-targeted ads that are relevant. By making sure that ads blend in with what people would like to see in their feeds anyway, Facebook was able to boost the percentage of marketing messages in the latest quarter.

While it is not known how much of Facebook’s Q4 sales came from the Asia Pacific (APAC), we did observe a sharp increase in Facebook spending in the region last year as advertisers spend more on Facebook ads than before.

The CPM (Cost per 1,000 impressions) for the APAC region grew 66% quarter-over-quarter in Q3 last year, more than the EMEA (27%) and the Americas (13%) regions.