Digital ad spend share India 2023, by industry

As India’s content consumption moved increasingly to online platforms, advertisers also followed their audiences to the digital world. Among the various industry verticals in the country, the telecom sector devoted 64 percent of its total ad expenditure in 2023 to digital. The e-commerce sector followed second and was the only other vertical to allocate over 60 percent of its ad spend to the medium.

Ad spends by format

Online ads made up the highest share of the digital media expenditure by the FMCG sector that year, spending 36 percent of their digital budget on it. However, most Indian business verticals preferred social media ads to online video ads. In 2019, about 28 percent of digital advertising expenditure in India was spent on social media compared to a 22 percent ad spend on online videos.

Social media ads win the popular vote

This is not surprising when one looks at the massive social media user base across India. As of January 2020, Facebook had an advertising reach of around 260 million users across India. This was the largest audience base reached via advertising in the country that year, followed by Instagram and LinkedIn with a reach of 80 million and 62 million users respectively. So long as social media platforms continue to facilitate a wider audience reach, advertisers will lean towards them for higher return on investments.