Facebook today announced that its new version of Offers with larger images and calls to action are now available on Android.
In February, the social network began testing the new layout on desktop with an option to shop immediately or get a reminder before the promotion ends. The interface also lets users decide if and when to share the offer with friends. We started seeing this on iOS in early April, and the company officially announced it a few weeks later. Now, the product is uniform across desktop and mobile, including Android.
Overall, the new design is likely to increase conversions on Offers posts because of the cleaner design and more prominent buttons to “Get offer” or “Shop now.” The “Remind Me” button available for some retailers working with Facebook directly allows companies to prompt users to redeem their offer at a later date through a notification on Facebook.
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As Facebook looks to convert more page owners into advertisers, it is trying even more new ways to highlight its Promoted Posts product.
Some users are now receiving notifications when one of their page posts performs better than average. The notification encourages page owners to advertise the post to get “even better results.” Whether or not they take the recommendation, page owners might appreciate the notice about how well their post is doing. This is similar to another recent test of a homepage module that identifies a well-performing post and links to a page where users could buy additional reach through Promoted Posts. This new test uses Facebook notifications instead.
Another test some users are seeing lately is an additional button to promote their posts. The button in the top right corner of an existing post next to the “highlight” and “edit” options features a megaphone icon, which Facebook uses to denote advertising. The story also includes a “boost post” button in the bottom right corner. Other page owners are seeing different language, including “promote” “get more reach” or “advertise post” instead of “boost post.”
Promoted Posts are page posts that get additional paid reach in News Feed among fans and friends of fans as a result of using a button on the page. Part of their appeal is that they don’t require page owners to create campaigns through the more complex ads create tool or Power Editor. However, as Facebook gets more aggressive in pushing these paid features, some page owners might be turned off.
First screenshot from Jay Baer via Social Marketers, a private industry group for social marketing professionals.
Triggit
Facebook Exchange retargeting partner Triggit today announced that it has secured $6 million in additional funding led by North Atlantic Capital along with existing investors Spark Capital and Foundry Group. Triggit says it will put the investment toward engineering and other talent as it focuses on improving products for advertisers retargeting users on the social network, particularly as Facebook evolves the exchange to include News Feed inventory.
Moontoast
Rich media advertising platform Moontoast today announced a partnership with user-generated video platform VideoGenie to give advertisers a new type of video ad unit within the Facebook News Feed. Brands will be able to post a call for user-generated video through their page, and directly from that post in News Feed, users will be able to record and submit their videos.
Mass Relevance
Social curation and engagement platform Mass Relevance today announced that it has integrated more than 25 billion pieces of content into dynamic visualizations on digital displays ranging from TV and second screens through billboards, stadium displays, websites, mobile apps, conference centers and in-store displays. Mass Relevance is the first Certified Twitter partner licensed to re-syndicate Twitter content for display. It can also aggregate, filter and display posts from Facebook. In the past year, Mass Relevance has powered social experiences for the the 2012 elections with CNN and Facebook; the Olympic Games with NBC and Twitter; as well as campaigns for brands like Pepsi and Doritos.
awe.sm
Social performance tracking platform awe.sm today announced a new CEO: Fred McIntyre, who has held senior leadership roles at AOL, Last.fm and CBS, and most recently has served as an advisor to Univision, SoundHound and other media companies and startups. awe.sm measures the business results of social marketing, such as signups and purchase. awe.sm co-founder and founding CEO Jonathan Strauss will now be Head of Product Development.
Compass Labs
Social marketing platform Compass Labs today announced a new dynamic campaign solution, The Social Advertising Optimizer, which automatically manages an advertiser’s bids. The tool can identify and optimize campaigns by ad placement, targeting and creative combinations based on different weighted actions and goals. Compass Labs says The Social Advertising Optimizer has helped clients achieve a 17 percent decrease in conversion costs. It is available as a standalone product or integrated in Compass Lab’s main platform, the CLIQ Ads Manager.
Optimal
Social advertising and analytics company Optimal, Inc. has launched Optimal Analytics, an audience analytics dashboard for demographic and engagement statistics, as well as competitive analysis across sources like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Tumblr. The tool looks at historical engagement data for top brands and daily interactions among millions of demographic and interest-based segments to give marketers key insights about their competitors and target audience. Marketers can get daily or weekly emails about the most engaging content from competitors or visit the tool directly to generate new consumer insights or build lookalike audiences for ad targeting.
Viralheat
Social marketing suite Viralheat today released a mobile app version of its platform, including the Viralheat stream and publishing tools. The app lets users manage multiple Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn accounts from their iPhones. They can schedule posts, monitor conversations, respond and check analytics.
Kenshoo Social, a platform for Facebook advertising, has shared the results of a study it recently commissioned by Forrester Consulting called “The Key to Successful Social Advertising.” The survey of 105 U.S. advertisers spending more than $100,000 per year on social ads found that more than a third were not satisfied with their efforts. At the same time, it found many social advertisers were not using advanced optimization tactics like granular targeting or automatic bid management.
However, satisfied social advertisers were more likely to be paying to promote content — as opposed to creating branded apps and other organic efforts. Among satisfied advertisers, those who paid to promote their content were more satisfied by their campaigns’ ability to generate awareness, and those who ran other types of paid advertisements on social networks were more satisfied with their campaigns’ ability to drive purchases. Overall, the study concluded that although organic efforts are more popular, paid social advertising is more successful.
Kenshoo and Forrester will go over these findings in a webinar at the end of the month.
Expion
Social media management software company Expion announced this week that it has added support for Instagram and Foursquare to its platform, allowing brands to better monitor and respond to activity on those networks. Expion is among a small group of companies with access to the Instagram API for moderation. Brands can now use Expion to view and comment on Instagram photos based on location. They can also easily share their Instagram photos across Facebook, Google and Twitter.
Nimble
Social CRM platform Nimble this week announced that it won the SIIA 2013 CODiE Award for Best Relationship Management Solution. Nimble helps marketers and salespeople manage their contacts from email and social networks, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and Foursquare. The Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA) is a trade association for the software and digital content industries. Nimble was one of 27 CODiE Award winners in software categories.
Facebook App User IDs are a new feature available to iOS developers who can use them to target their users by actions they took within their app. This is already available in the Facebook SDK for iOS, but will come to the Android SDK soon.
App User IDs are a component of Custom Audiences. Previously, advertisers could create targeting groups by hashed email addresses, phone numbers or user IDs. Now, developers have a way to target ads to their app users who haven’t logged in with Facebook or registered with an email address or phone number.
For example, a shopping app can target people who made a purchase and then show them ads with other items they may be interested in. A game developer can target engaged users of one of their games with ads for another game that they make.
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Facebook Exchange retargeting ads that appear within News Feed deliver an average increase in ROI of 197 percent compared to FBX ads on the right hand side of Facebook.com, according to an early study by Nanigans.
Nanigans was among three “Qualified DSPs” with alpha access to Facebook’s first tests of putting FBX ads — targeted by web browsing cookies rather than Facebook data — into the desktop News Feed. Earlier this week, the social network gave beta access to several more DSPs.
Previously, FBX ads were only delivered in the sidebar. Many advertisers were already pleased with the performance of these ads compared to performance on other exchanges, but News Feed inventory could really give Facebook the edge. Sponsored Stories and Page Post Ads in the feed can have 10 to 20 times higher clickthrough rates than sidebar ads.
Now Nanigans has shared data from its recent alpha tests: an average 17.1 times higher CTRs and 51 percent lower CPCs for FBX in News Feed versus in sidebar. As mentioned, ROI was 197 percent higher as a result. These numbers come from more than 10 million ad impressions between April 18 and May 6 from retailers selling a variety of products, Nanigans says.
Among the benefits of FBX over other exchanges were lower costs per acquisition and ads that appear above the fold and on brand-safe pages. With News Feed inventory, FBX ads are in Page Post Link format, meaning they’re much bigger than before, and they get prime real estate among posts from users’ friends and pages. Additionally, News Feed-based FBX ads include options for Likes, comments and shares, which could lead to other types of engagement or even virality.
Facebook today announced that it is opening desktop News Feed inventory to more Facebook Exchange partners.
This will allow businesses to retarget Facebook users who visited their websites with Page Post Link ads in the News Feed, instead of with small ads in the right hand column. News Feed ads typically have much higher clickthrough rates than sidebar ads. Facebook had been testing this with a few demand side platforms (DSPs) Nanigans, Mediamath and Tellapart since late March and said the test was successful.
Now all “Qualified DSPs” have beta access and can create News Feed-based FBX campaigns for their customers. FBX retargeting ads are still not eligible for mobile, however.
The ads will appear in the News Feed the same as any other page post ad or Promoted Post bought through Facebook’s internal platform. Users will not be able to differentiate if the ads were purchased through the FBX or Facebook’s internal platform. Like previous FBX ads, Facebook’s format places a number of restrictions on creative, where advertisers might be used to more dynamic rich media ads on other exchanges. However, the new format introduces options for users to Like, share or comment on an ad, whereas previously users could only click on the ad and be taken to a third-party site.
Because this ad type uses Page Post Link ads, businesses can use “unpublished posts” to test and optimize different creative options. However, realtime dynamic creative is not available for this format. An example Page Post Link ad is below.
Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg shared today on the company’s first quarter earnings call that its acquisition of Atlas from Microsoft closed last week and that she welcomed the team to Facebook today.
Atlas Advertiser Suite is a platform that advertisers and agencies use to plan, manage, track and optimize their digital marketing. Facebook agreed to buy the platform and Seattle-based team from Microsoft at the end of February.
Sandberg said Atlas is important for its measurement capabilities, not its potential to power an ad network, which many have speculated about. She said Facebook has “no plans” to create an ad network to serve Facebook ads on third-party sites. Atlas will continue to be a tool for advertisers to measure the effect of their online ads on Facebook and other platforms.
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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on today’s first quarter earnings call that mobile app install ads were “one of most important new ad products” the company offers.
COO Sheryl Sandberg pointed out that 3,800 developers used the product to drive a total of 25 million app downloads in the App Store and Google Play. Forty percent of the 100 top-grossing apps for Android and iPhone have advertised on Facebook, Sandberg said.
CFO David Ebersman said that mobile app install ads actually lead to a lot of incremental revenue, as many of these developers are newly spending on the Facebook platform, not just reallocating existing budget to a newer format.
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