Facebook Inc. aims to make the native ads it places on mobile apps via its Audience Network mobile ad network more enticing to consumers.
Audience Network enables Facebook advertisers to target their Facebook ads to consumers off of the social network with a single click. When a marketer creates an ad on the social network, Facebook’s ad-creation tool will note whether the ad is in a format that can be disseminated via the Audience Network. If it is, a marketer can select whether he wants to place it on mobile apps.
The mobile ad network is growing quickly; since Facebook opened up Audience Network to all of its advertisers in October, the number of apps where Facebook can place marketers’ ads has grown fivefold.
Of the three ad units—banner, interstitial and native ads—Facebook offered when it launched Audience Network, native ads have performed the best, Jenny Abramson, a Facebook software engineer, writes in a blog post. “The best part of Audience Network is its native ad format,” she writes. “Native ads allow publishers to create custom ad experiences in their apps that maximize yield and user experience.”
More than half of developer revenue from Audience Network comes from native ads, and publishers have been able to charge up to seven times more per thousand impressions for native ads when compared to standard banner ads.
To improve the performance of native ads it places, Facebook is letting publishers define the characteristics—including the fonts, ad heights, background and button colors—so that they are more in line with the apps’ overall look and feel. By making ads better blend with an app’s other content, Facebook hopes more consumers will click the ads.
Facebook also introduced a native ads manager tool that lets publishers store and deliver ads. The tool automatically delivers the highest-performing ads.
Audience Network ads already appear to be a good value for marketers, according to advertising vendor Nanigans. A recent study by the vendor found that the cost-per-impression from Audience Network ads was 3% less than for news feed ads.
In related Facebook advertising news, the social network extended the deep-linking capabilities that it already offered in its mobile app reengagement ads, which seek to drive consumers to use the apps they’ve already downloaded, to its mobile app install ads, which aim to drive users to download an app. Deep linking refers to the practice of automatically sending a consumer from an e-mail, ad or web site into an app rather than a web site.
That means that when when a consumer taps on a mobile app install ad, a retailer can send him to a specific place in the app, such as a product page, rather than the home page.
“This will make mobile app ads more effective for achieving a developer’s goals beyond the install, and provide people with better experiences by taking them to the content that attracted their attention in the ad,” writes John Ketchpaw, a Facebook engineering manager, in a blog post.
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