by Laurie Sullivan @lauriesullivan, June 7, 2017

Google spent nearly $350 million to advertising its products and services in 2016 — up from $232 million in 2015 and $227 million in 2014, Kantar Media reports. Investments went to display, search, mobile, online video, TV, print, and OOH.

Rival Microsoft spent $746 million in 2016, up from nearly $700 million in 2015 and $617 million in 2014.

Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, spent nearly $7.8 million in Google search during 2016 — up from $5.6 million in 2015, and nearly $3.9 million in 2014. Google buys advertising on Bing, but the numbers remain unknown.

Television also attracted both Google and Microsoft. Google spent $260 million in 2016 — up from a mere nearly $180 million in the prior year — whereas Microsoft spent $506 million, up from $472 million, respectively.

LinkedIn, now owned by Microsoft, invested 80% of its $2.2 million TV ad expenditure — about $1.7 million — to feature one ad during the Oscars, according to Kantar Media.

Despite the ability of Google and Microsoft to dig deep into their coffers last year, Facebook had the highest uptick in the amount spent. In fact, Facebook’s advertising investment rose 260% to $80.7 million. About 64%, or $51 million was spent to promote Facebook Live, the company’s live streaming feature.

Facebook also invested $47.5 million in television in 2016.

Among other social networks, Twitter is the only one that lowered advertising investments in 2016 — it invested 70% less in marketing in 2016 compared with the previous year, at $9.2 million. Snapchat nearly doubled its ad spend to $3.2 million. Pinterest’s ad spend rose slightly to $2.1 million.

MediaPost.com: Search Marketing Daily

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