Will Higher Ad Revenues Aid Meta Platforms Stock in Q4 Earnings?

Meta Platforms’ META fourth-quarter 2025 results, set to be reported on Jan. 28, are expected to reflect the benefits of higher advertising revenues. The Zacks Consensus Estimate for Meta Platforms’ fourth-quarter advertising revenues is pegged at $56.85 billion, indicating growth of 21.5% year over year.

META’s staggering reach and increasing ad impressions (up 14% year over year in the third quarter of 2025) make it one of the most important players in the digital ad sales market, apart from Alphabet GOOGL and Amazon AMZN. Meta Platforms, along with Alphabet and Amazon, are expected to absorb more than 50% of the projected global ad spending this year and 56.2% in 2026.

Alphabet’s focus on leveraging AI to drive growth is a key catalyst. AI is infused heavily across its offerings, including Search and Google Cloud. AI Overviews and AI Mode are driving overall queries and commercial queries, thereby driving monetization opportunities. Amazon’s advertising business continues rapid expansion as brands allocate more marketing budgets to the ecommerce giant’s platform, leveraging its valuable consumer data and purchase intent signals.

However, META’s rapid AI push is expected to drive advertising revenue growth. Click here to learn how Meta Platforms’ overall fourth-quarter performance is likely to be.

AI Push to Aid META’s Q4 Advertising Revenue Growth

Meta Platforms’ focus on improving ad ranking and measurement by leveraging AI has been a key catalyst driving advertisers’ return on investment. META has been leveraging AI and machine learning to boost the potency of WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook and Threads. Effective usage of AI has been helping the company keep its users engaged. AI-driven feed recommendations have been a key catalyst. 

META’s Advantage+ creative suite is gaining traction, with the number of advertisers using at least one of its video generation features going up 20% on a sequential basis as adoption of image animation and video expansion continues to scale. The addition of more generative AI features is making it easier for advertisers to optimize their ad creatives and drive increased performance. Meta Platforms introduced AI-generated music for advertisers in the third quarter of 2025. These factors are expected to have driven user base growth in the fourth quarter of 2025. 

The Zacks Consensus Estimate for advertising revenues in Asia-Pacific is pegged at $10.91 billion, indicating year-over-year growth of 21.1% in the fourth quarter of 2025. The consensus mark for advertising revenues in Europe, the United States and Canada, and the Rest of the World is pegged at $14.02 billion, $25.58 billion and $6.98 billion, respectively, indicating 25.7%, 22% and 24% growth.

The consensus mark for Family Daily Active People or DAP, defined as a registered and logged-in user who visited at least one of the Family products on a given day, is expected to be 3.57 billion for the fourth quarter of 2025.

Zacks Rank & Upcoming Earnings to Watch

Meta Platforms currently has a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.

META peers Alphabet and Snap SNAP are set to report their respective quarterly earnings on Feb. 4, while Amazon will report on Feb. 5. Shares of Alphabet and Amazon have surged 73.7% and 1.3%, while Snap has dropped 30.3% in the trailing 12-month period. 

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This article originally published on Zacks Investment Research (zacks.com).

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