Facebook new advertising announcements
On top of the new Timeline for pages, the company also unveiled new products for advertisers at its facebook Marketing Conference. The following is my summary of what I’ve gathered reading about the announcements this morning.
Premium ads
First, …
Starting today, ads bought through "Premium on Facebook" can be displayed in the mobile news feed; advertisers will also have the option to display content on the desktop logout screen starting April. Before, users would only see ads on the sidebar and the desktop news feed.
So Facebook adds two new places for brands to place ads, but…
Brands will not be able to actively select which of the 4 placements their ads will appear in. They will see reporting data afterwards on whether ads appeared on the logout page, sidebar, or news feed, but data won’t be broken out separate mobile and web news feed ads.
Reach Generator
On top of this, Facebook also annouced a new product called ‘Reach Generator’. It’s good to create great content on your page, but it’s useless if nobody sees it. Facebook tries to address this problem with ‘Reach Generator’:
Reach Generator allows advertisers to pay Facebook on an ongoing basis, as opposed to a CPC or CPM basis, to sponsor one page post every day, and guarantee a 75 percent reach of the page’s fanbase over a month-long period. The company said that test partners, including Ben & Jerry’s, were able to reach 98 percent of their page’s fans using Reach Generator, a massive increase over the 16 percent of fans that Pages reach without ads or Sponsored Stories.
The selected posts will then be promoted through all the different ad placements.
As Pandodaily reports, this new product is currently only available to big clients. It looks like Facebook would like to limit the spam this could cause.
To start, the company is limiting eligibility for Reach Generator by number of fans. They haven’t said what that threshold is, but I can assume it’ll be open to only the most-liked brands to start.
Offers
Finally, Facebook kills ‘Deals’ and give access to a new story type: Offers.
For users, getting offers is frictionless. One click (or tap on mobile) sends the offer to a user’s email account. From there, they can use the voucher at a brick and mortar location or enter a coupon code into an e-commerce site. When users get an offer, a story is available to be shown on Timeline and in their friends’ News Feeds, increasing the viral reach of the promotion.
Unlike Deals, …
Offers will be created directly from the page publisher and do not require approval from Facebook before going live. (…) Creating an offer is free for page owners, just like making any other post. Companies, however, can pay to boost the unit into a Sponsored Story by using the self-serve ad tool, or turn it into a premium homepage ad by working directly with Facebook.
Conclusion
The possibility to advertise in the user’s feed both on the desktop and mobile is probably the biggest news. It is easy to compare it with Twitter’s recent move:
(…) they’re both doing the same thing: They’re selling brands access to the primary stream of content that both companies serve up to their users. And they’ll let them do it on mobile phones, too.
Probably what advertisers have been dreaming for, but not what users have been asking for.