When Will Facebook Create Advertising APIs for Marketers?
Facebook’s performance advertising system is a powerful platform for a variety of businesses large and small to reach and engage their audience on Facebook in a very targeted way. However, unlike search marketing, which is keyword-targeted, Facebook Ads are people-targeted, meaning advertisers can filter their target audience according to almost any information they’ve shared on their Facebook profile. Just last month, Facebook released new radius and language targeting capabilities.
Today, Facebook says it has “tens of thousands” of advertisers on its performance ads platform. However, for marketing firms managing multiple campaigns across multiple accounts, it can become complex to manage everything with Facebook’s standard ad management interface. Google AdWords, albeit of course a much more mature platform, has a robust API that has enabled an entire ecosystem of sophisticated third party ad management tools designed to manage and optimize AdWords performance.
When will Facebook do the same thing? Such APIs would allow more marketing dollars to flow through the system, increase the quality of the ads, and make pricing more efficient. For its part, Facebook is still building out many of the key features advertisers are requesting (like radius and language targeting most recently), but won’t comment on any specific plans to open up APIs.
“We’re always looking into ways to make Facebook Ads easier. Developing an API is one way to do that but we have no announcements to make at this time,” a Facebook spokesperson told Inside Facebook.
As it stands, search marketers tell us that they are resorting to internal naming conventions to manage their campaigns. For now, that level of campaign management will need to suffice. However, we’ll let you know whenever Facebook makes any APIs available.
April 4th, 2009 at 2:26 pm
It is amazing how inefficient the system is to manage multiple campaigns from a billing and campaign management perspective. Can’t wait to see what they come up with related to more efficient campaign management systems. Given the number of Google employees working at Facebook, I would expect to see something sooner than later!
Dave Williams
BLiNQ Media
http://www.blinqmedia.com
September 8th, 2009 at 1:25 am
The Facebook Advertising API is in Alpha and is open for private/invite only testing.
October 2nd, 2009 at 10:23 am
[...] this year, we speculated on when Facebook would launch APIs for Facebook Ads to allow performance marketers to automate ad management. Well, it appears it’s happening [...]
October 5th, 2009 at 11:39 am
Any contact inside Facebook o MSFT to talk about it? Any Forum? Thanks!!!
October 15th, 2009 at 4:17 am
[...] When Will Facebook Create Advertising APIs for Marketers? La differenza fondamentale tra l’advertising tradizionale su motori di ricerca e quello su Facebook è che il primo si definisce “keyword targeted“, mentre il secondo è “people targeted“. La piattaforma advertising di Facebook, infatti, permette di definire i parametri demografici dell’audience a cui è rivolto il messaggio pubblicitario in base ai dati condivisi sui profili all’interno del social network. Inside Facebook pone una questione molto interessante, quella dell’advertising A.P.I., facendo il paragone tra il sistema AdWords di Google e quello interno a Facebook. Molte volte gli advertisers gestiscono campagne pubblicitarie su Facebook tramite account multipli, e questa attività può diventare molto difficoltosa senza uno strumento in grado di ottimizzare il tutto ed anche di migliorare le performance delle campagne. Google AdWords propone tutto questo già da tempo ai suoi fruitori, che hanno inoltre a diposizione strumenti creati ad hoc da terze parti. A quando l’advertising A.P.I. per Facebook? [...]