Hundreds of millions of Facebook users, including you, should start bracing up for a lot more vigorous flow of advertising – not only in their newsfeed and on their mobile but also when they are logged off. The top social networking site has just announced a suite of advertising-oriented products aimed at inserting more ads into its traditionally clean interface. The company intends to draw more from mobile ads, where it has apparently struggled.
This announcement was made at the marketing conference, held at the Manhattan-based American Museum of Natural History. It comes right on the heels of a similar plan Twitter to launch a mobile ad program, and could mean a bigger flow of ads for users on Facebook. “If we wish to take everything and then make it social, we cannot do it alone,” said the Facebook chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, in her opening remarks.
A greater scope for advertisers
In the run-up to this conference, there was speculation in the advertising industry that it would finally employ the vast store of data for serving ads on the wider Web, well beyond its own walled garden. But the social site still appears focused on its own interface, unlike Google. The effort offers for advertisers a greater scope to access more users in many more places. In spite of courting Madison Avenue for quite a few years, the site has been a sort of anomaly in the domain of digital advertising.
The ad units provided advertisers with less creative options, especially those wanting to, say, take over its home page or insert moving text to an advertisement. Rather, the Facebook’s ad value was in its data and personalization element. The chance for boosting more ad dollars potential was reflected in Facebook’s first filing for an IPO last month.
Efforts to boost ad revenue
Analysts stated the company was likely to be valued at about $75- $100 billion. However, according to the filing, it generated merely $3.7 billion of revenue last year, the large chunk of that from advertising. Advertisers until now were largely confined to various ad spaces positioned on the Facebook home page, in addition to making their own pages on it.
The latest announcement revolved around a set of ‘premium ads’, which will now run at different points in the website, with an emphasis on those running throughout mobile feed of a user. The announcement probably made it the largest mobile-based marketing platform, according to a section of marketing experts.
At the conference, the company promoted other new features for advertisers. For example, by April, Facebook is moving all marketers’ pages to its new Timeline format that allows advertisers to have more dynamic pages for their own brands. In addition, anything posted on an advertiser’s own page — status updates, photos and videos — can be made into an ad that can be pushed out to users’ newsfeeds and mobile feeds.
