Facebook introduced its Audience Network in 2014 and it has now become a billion-dollar industry on its own! Earlier in January, the company announced that it made $1 billion in Q4 2015, making it very lucrative. Now, Audience Network is being expanded, to include the mobile Web and not just mobile apps.
Also Read: Facebook Stops Taking LiveRail Customers To Focus On Audience Network
A few weeks ago, Facebook let us know that it would no longer be taking LiveRail customers because it wanted to concentrate on its Audience Network business. This week, Facebook officially announced its intentions – Mike Murphey, a software engineer at the company wrote,
[quote]Today the Audience Network is expanding to include support for mobile web, bringing the value of native ad formats and people-based marketing to a new set of publishers. We’re also enabling 2.5 million Facebook advertisers to reach more of the people they care about on mobile devices.[/quote]
The reason is simple really… digital media consumption from Web browsers on mobile has risen 52% in the last two years alone and news sites are getting roughly 40% or their traffic from mobile devices. From that traffic, 93% of it comes from the mobile Web.
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Facebook‘s focus is to create “real outcomes from advertisers” – sales or app installs for example. It wants to give publishers the opportunity to optimise their ad performance with its Advertiser Outcome Score. This generates value for advertisers and so Audience Network rewards those publishers for this value that they provide.
For any publisher in interested in starting on the Facebook Audience Network there is no software-development-kit integration necessary and so it is all very easy. There are several native ad formats on mobile Web. Mike Murphey explained that the company is
[quote]expanding into mobile Web with successful native formats that make up more than 80 percent of the impressions on the Audience Network today and perform up to seven times better than standard banner formats.[/quote]
Publishers are able to use “fully customizable native units and innovative formats like carousel ads that showcase multiple images to create unique ad experiences that match the look and feel of their mobile website” as well as use native versions of standard ad formats like 300X250 for example.
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Beta-testing of Facebook Audience Network for the mobile Web is open, and interested parties can apply here.