Social media giant Facebook Inc. (NASDAQ: FB) has announced an innovation in its advertising business. From now on the company will show ads to Facebook and non-Facebook users, expanding their market to all of the Internet across the world.
On 2014, the company presented Facebook Audience Network, which gave advertisers the opportunity to use Facebook profiles as databases to pick their targeted audience for a particular product.
Facebook Audience Network functions by what the company calls custom audiences, core audiences and lookalike audiences measuring the tastes of Facebook users and dividing them into specific groups with different tastes, allowing advertisers to show their product to the desired market.
Facebook first introduced this feature to allow advertisers show new mobile applications or gain app engagement. The company expanded this feature to different products.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Facebook generated over $17 billion in advertising only. The company takes an unspecific cut of the ads revenue. According to sources of the Journal, Facebook takes up to 30% of the ad share, and the rest is given to publishers.
Now, Facebook will expand its advertising platform to all sort of Internet users, looking to enhance advertising for mobile and online users and create an improved ad market. When Facebook first showed its audience network, it required ads to have specific high qualities to appear on the website.
The same characteristics apply to Facebook’s expansion on the advertising market, which is now targeting every Internet user in the world, despite being a Facebook user or not.
Enhancing Internet advertising
Facebook explained on its newsroom on Thursday, the annoying experience of opening a website on a mobile device and having giants ads filling up the screen.
“Once it appears, the article is blocked by an ad. You might see a tiny ‘X’ to hide the ad, but if you tap in the wrong spot you get redirected to an app store,” explained the company in a press release.
The social media giant revealed how the innovative ads service offers higher quality for both users and advertisers thanks to its integrity measures on the ads.
Facebook has a series of standards before accepting any advertising on its website. Some of the standards include a 20% only of text in the shown image, using the Facebook name correctly, restrictions on older adult content such as alcoholic beverages, between many others that offer a higher quality advertising.
The company is currently developing a technology that will determine when a user taps incorrectly on an ad in a mobile device, to prevent users from being drifted to another screen.
Facebook is also allowing users to control the type of ads they see on the social media and now on the whole internet by just clicking on Facebook settings. Users can now choose what type of ads they are interested in or of users want to opt out of online advertising.
How does it work?
When being limited to only Facebook users, the website tracked the amount of “Likes” a user gave to different content to determine the ad that will best fit them. With the expansion, Facebook will remain using the “Like” tracking, yet pieces of codes on different websites will allow the company to gather information about the user’s tastes.
“Our buttons and plugins send over basic information about users’ browsing sessions. For non-Facebook members, previously we didn’t use it. Now we’ll use it to better understand how to target those people,” said Andrew Bosworth Facebook’s ads and business platform vice president.
Now, when users visit a particular website with content such as sports or entertainment, Facebook will collect information about the tastes of the user and will recommend similar content on their ads.
The innovation works by tagging the user with a particular online tracking platform that places codes on the users to identify them on the web.
This new measure positions Facebook as one of the top online and mobile advertising platforms, becoming a great competition to Google’s ad market.
Source: Facebook