Facebook launches two new data-based tools for advertisers: Audience Network, which places ads in third-party apps, and a tool that taps into your location.
Imagine this: You're in the car and use Shazam to tag a song. Up pops an ad, tailored for you based on your Facebook data. Or, you're browsing your Facebook news feed on the train after work when up pop several ads for nearby businesses: a local coffee shop, for example.
That's the reality of two new advertising tools that Facebook launched this week. The first, called Audience Network, is an ad platform that lets businesses use Facebook's data to show ads to you in third-party apps. The other, which Facebook calls "awareness ads," taps into your location to show you ads from businesses that are nearby.
These two additions to Facebook advertising follow the social network's relaunch of its Atlas ad server, which uses Facebook as a data proxy for cookies in mobile ad performance. Together, they position Facebook well in the mobile advertising market.
"Facebook will win a lot of advertising dollars because the data they have rivals Google's," said Rob Shavell, CEO at online privacy company Abine. "Google doesn't know you like Facebook does. Facebook knows your name and who your friends are. It knows your location. That's a huge advantage that will impact advertising."
Facebook's Audience Network and location-based ads are open to advertisers worldwide and in the US, respectively. Here's what you need to know about each of them.
Audience Network
Facebook officially launched its new mobile ad network this week, six months after announcing it at f8. The Audience Network lets advertisers buy ads that appear in third-party apps and uses Facebook's vault of personal data to target them.
This means that a user could see an ad inside a mobile app that's based on her activity -- such as liking a brand -- in Facebook. Zynga, Shazam, and Merriam-Webster have already use Facebook's Audience Network, the social network said.
Ads purchased through Audience Network come in three varieties: banner, interstitial, and a native format, Facebook said.
Along with the official rollout of Audience Network, Facebook also expanded the types of ads it displays. They now include support link ads, which means any advertiser can use the network to drive traffic to its mobile site, Facebook said.
Audience Network puts Facebook in closer competition with Google, which accounted for about half of the mobile ad industry spending, according to eMarketer. Facebook sits in second place behind Google, with its ad revenue share expected to reach 22% this year. Twitter is a distant third at about 3%.
Location-based ads
The next time you walk past a restaurant, you might see an ad for it in your news feed. On Tuesday, Facebook announced a new type of ad that lets businesses target people based on whether they're near the establishment.
"With local awareness ads, businesses can quickly and easily find new customers by showing ads to groups of people who are near that business," Facebook said in the announcement. "Local awareness ads are built to be more cost-effective than traditional advertising channels like newspaper while offering more precise targeting and greater reach."
Businesses can select this type of ad by visiting the Ads Create tool and selecting "Local Awareness." You can choose the advertising radius, such as 1 mile, then enter in the other demographics you want to target and assign a budget and duration for your ad.
These localized ads could help small businesses reach a broader audience, important because many SMBs have seen their organic reach decline.
Facebook says it does not disclose the specific individuals that are in an audience, and that users won't be shown these hyper-local ads unless they have location services enabled on their phone. The ads will roll out to advertisers in the US over the next few weeks, Facebook said.
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Facebook warns businesses to avoid schemes that promise to boost audience numbers through paid-for Likes.
Facebook is waging war against fake Likes, and the results have been profitable. According to Facebook site integrity engineer Matt Jones, the social network has obtained nearly $2 billion in legal judgments against spammers.
Spammers tempt unknowing businesses with schemes to boost their Facebook audience by purchasing Likes. These offers, which often promise thousands of Likes for mere dollars, are delivered by creating fake accounts or hacking into real accounts and using them to spread spam, Jones said. Because these paid-for users aren't real, Pages end up doing less business on Facebook.
"Fake likes are only profitable when they can spread at scale," Jones said in a post. "To make it harder for these scams to be profitable, our abuse-fighting team builds and constantly updates a combination of automated and manual systems that help us catch suspicious activity at various points of interaction on the site, including registration, friending, liking, and messaging."
Some of these tactics include limiting Likes per account. When activity spikes, Facebook makes sure the Likes are legitimate by asking for additional verification. It has also pursued legal opportunities, which have amounted to nearly $2 billion in profit. Facebook did not disclose details about the judgments, but called it a reminder to spammers that it will fight back to prevent abuse on its platform.
Facebook warned businesses to avoid any schemes that promise Facebook Likes in exchange for money since you won't see much engagement with your page in return.
"Our algorithm takes Page engagement rates into account when deciding when and where to deliver a Page's legitimate ads and content, so Pages with an artificially inflated number of likes are actually making it harder on themselves to reach the people they care about most," Jones said.
Instead, Pages should focus on specific business objectives -- like driving in-store sales or boosting app downloads -- over obtaining more Likes. For businesses that need to grow their audience in order to achieve their business objectives, Facebook says you should visit the "Build Audience" tab to invite friends to like the page or pay to promote it using targeting criteria that you specify.
Lastly, Facebook encouraged Page admins to recognize and avoid malicious links that could infect your page with malware. These include links that promote a "shocking video" or "unbelievable photos of you"; visiting a website that claims to offer special features on Facebook; and downloading a browser add-on that claim to do something that alters your Facebook experience, such as seeing who's viewed your profile, changing the color of your profile, or removing your timeline.
Facebook has made an effort to cut down on other types of spam in the past. In April, it announced plans to target content that clutters users' news feeds, such as photos or videos that users and Pages repeatedly upload, and posts that explicitly ask users to comment or like in order to get more distribution. Facebook said that these types of posts are 15% less relevant than other stories with a comparable number of Likes, comments, and shares.