Inside Facebook

In a move likely to at least incrementally increase ad revenues, Facebook has added Social Ads on the right side of business Pages. This means that advertisers can now reach their target demographic in more places across the site.

Previously, most of Facebook’s performance ad inventory was shown on the profile page and application pages. (For detailed background on how Facebook’s performance ad system works, see our recent interview with Tim Kendall, Facebook’s Director of Monetization.)

However, Facebook has NOT enabled targeting ads to viewers of a specific Page or type of Page. Pages are still targeted by user profile data. Were Facebook to enable Page-level targeting, it would likely lead to bidding on inventory from competitors’ Pages. Facebook has decided not to go down this route for now.

“We thought it was important to expand the opportunities for your ads to be shown across another popular section of the site… As with all Facebook Ads, the enhanced distribution is based on the audience you have selected when you created your ad, not based on the content of that Page,” Facebook says.

Over 3.5 million people become Fans of Facebook pages each day. As Inside Facebook recently detailed, Pages are slated to undergo a major redesign perhaps as soon as this week – for all the details on the changes, click here.