Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired
Facebook is extending the reach of its ad-targeting talents—again.
On Tuesday, the social networking giant invited all mobile app developers and publishers onto the Facebook Audience Network, a mobile advertising network that extends beyond Facebook itself and onto third-party mobile apps. Facebook began testing the network in January, and now, according to Facebook product manager Sriram Krishnan, who oversees the company’s mobile advertising efforts, the network is “broadly available.” That means any developer or publisher can sign up to display the network’s ads inside their apps—and take a cut of the revenue.
Facebook’s pitch is that this revenue will be higher than what developers and publishers could get from other mobile ad networks, because the Facebook network lets advertisers target users on mobile apps in much the same way they target users on Facebook proper. Advertisers, you see, will pay a premium for such targeting. As it seeks to grab an even larger share of the $140 billion digital advertising market, this is where Facebook has an advantage over the likes of Google and other smaller players. Because Facebook holds so much personal data about its users, it can more closely match ads to particular types of people—based on things like age and gender and online habits—and that means it can charge more for those ads.
The Audience Network is just one way that Facebook is expanding this sort of ad targeting beyond its own social network. Last week, the company unveiled Atlas, a separate tool that allows companies to grab ads from all sorts of sources and serve them across all sorts of sites and services, and it too can target ads based on Facebook data.
With the Audience Network, Sriram Krishnan explains, Facebook targets users via a mobile device identifier—a software token that’s specific to a particular phone or tablet. This lets the company identify users as they move from app to app, and that means it can serve them ads just as it would on Facebook itself. And in some cases, it can bring in higher ad revenues—both for itself and for the developers and publishers displaying the ads.
Chris Akhavan, president of publishing at Glu Mobile, a company that has tested the Facebook Audience network inside its mobile game apps, tells WIRED that, at least in some instances, ad revenue is two times higher on the network than on competing mobile ad networks. “In some cases, they have doubled the performance we’ve seen on a per impression basis in terms of revenue generated,” he says. And, he tell us, it isn’t hard to see why. Glu has also tapped into the other side of Facebook’s ad equation, using the social network to target its own ads for its own apps, and as Akhavan explains, no other ad network—and Glu uses about 50 of them—let it so closely match ads with consumers.
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