Last year, Facebook introduced its Ad Exchange, which changed how they sold their advertising online. Instead of using your liked pages and interests, they began to target you with ads based on your browsing history. However, in the past month, they’ve upped the ante once again, and now you’ll find these ads popping up in your news feed – a total game-changer.
Retargeting company AdRoll has conducted a study of these news feed ads, finding that they have a have a massive 21 times higher click-through rates than standard web retargeting ads and an incredible 49 times the click-through rate of Facebook’s right-hand side ads.
From our own experience, we’ve found that Facebook’s right-hand-side adverts often go unseen, as many users automatically block out the ad area, but when they pop up in your stream, the adverts are bound to catch your eye. As they’re also targeted to sell you something you’re likely to be interested in, it’s no surprise that they’re nearly 50 times more effective.
As well as the targeting of the ads, there’s also the social aspect of things, meaning that as well as better-performing adverts, companies now can gain even more interaction with their fans and customers with likes, shares, comments, and everything else Facebook has to offer.
These ads and their success are integral to Facebook’s future growth, especially in the mobile and handheld market, so we will definitely be keeping an eye on them in future.
