MENLO PARK, CA: Facebook's mobile advertising revenues, as a proportion of the whole, has doubled within a year as more of the tech giant's user base accesses the service via smartphone or tablet.

In a quarterly earnings call, CEO Mark Zuckerberg outlined several "milestones", including having more than 1bn monthly active users on mobile and almost 55% of daily active users only connecting on mobile.

Zuckerberg also highlighted the fact that, in the first quarter of 2014, some 59% of the company's advertising revenue came from mobile, up from 53% in the fourth quarter of last year and up from 30% in the same period last year.

In monetary terms, mobile ad revenue was growing even faster, up from $377m in the first quarter of 2013 to around $1.3bn in Q1 2014.

That performance had been helped by App Installs, "one of our best performing ad products," Zuckerberg said, which had driven over 350m installs to date.

Over 60% of the top grossing apps on the Apple App Store and Google Play use Mobile App Ads, which, he observed "is a pretty impressive performance for a product that launched in January last year".

In addition to the expanding user base, more and more marketers were turning to Facebook, and while the growth was broad-based, there was "particular strength" from small and medium-sized businesses and from direct response, the company claimed.

Zuckerberg added that improved targeting and simplified ad tools were proving attractive to this audience. "Ten times more marketers are now using our Custom Audiences targeting feature compared to last year," he said.

Investment in improving measurement tools was another factor, with direct response advertisers now able measure the impact of a Facebook ad campaign on online sales.

For the future, Zuckerberg saw "significant opportunities" to develop newer products like premium video and ads on Instagram, while a mobile ad network was at an early testing phase. He said initial results here were promising but he did not expect meaningful contributions from these projects during 2014.

Data sourced from Seeking Alpha; additional content by Warc staff