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Facebook ads are 1,790% more profitable on iPhone than Android

If you're an advertiser using Facebook ads on mobile, you may as well just stop advertising on Android right now and go iOS-only. That's because an analysis of more than 200 billion Facebook ads on mobile by Nanigans (one of the largest Facebook ad buyers) found that the return on investment of a Facebook ad on iOS is 1,790 percent greater than the same ad is on Android.

Think about how profound that number is for a second: put the same ad on Facebook for mobile on an iOS device and an Android device and you'll make 1,790 percent the ROI. What's more, since the average cost of CPMs (cost per thousand impressions) is US$4.99 for the iPhone and $4.87 for Android, it hardly costs advertisers any more to increase their ROI by almost 1,800 percent. In even more bad news for Android, while advertisers get 162 percent more cash than they spend on an iPhone ad itself, an ad on Android returns 10 percent less to the advertiser than the cost of the ad.

The results of Nanigans analysis of 200 billion ads are sure to send shockwaves through the mobile ad industry -- and a fair amount of panic from Android advertisers. As VentureBeat's John Koetsier writes:

When I talked to Nanigans SVP Dan Slagen about the results, he was candid, telling me that the company was a little "on the fence" about publishing that data, knowing that it would be controversial. Ultimately, however, that's the data that the company was seeing, and the company decided to let the data speak.

As for why advertising ROI is so much greater on iPhone, Slagen says it boils down to the fact that, on average, iPhone owners make and are willing to spend more money than Android owners -- which is also why profits for app developers are more on iOS than on Android.