Facebook Rolls Out Major Upgrades To Ad System

Facebook Rolls Out Major Upgrades To Ad System

This evening Facebook has rolled out a number of significant upgrades to the company’s self-serve advertising system which will benefit those marketing their Facebook Pages as well as advertisers in general.
Sponsored Stories

The most obvious change is the ability of self-serve advertisers to publish the new sponsored stories ad format that we’ve previously covered. There are two types of sponsored stories for Facebook page administrators: “Like Stories” and “Page Post Stories,” both of which are pictured in the image below. Both are definitely interesting and I’m sure page administrators will be split testing these types of ads for campaigns beginning immediately in an effort to decrease their fan acquisition costs.

Landing Tab Selection

The other major upgrade is the ability of page administrators to select which tab they’d like visitors to land on when they click on the ad (pictured below). This is yet another thing for page administrators to split test in an effort to decrease the effective cost of each new fan.

Facebook’s Recirculation Of Users

The most incredible aspect of these upgrades, outside of the fact that advertisers get to split test their ads more effectively, is that Facebook is charging advertisers to recirculate users within its own site. It’s an absolutely genius system that we have discussed many times before, and it’s one that I personally have never seen executed so effectively by any large online property. Not even Yahoo, a company with one of the most impressions on the Internet, has figured out a way to charge advertisers for driving traffic to the search engine’s own properties.

It’s pretty straightforward: the more Facebook advertisers spend, the more impressions the social network gets on its site, and the more revenue the company generates. While the integration of off-site open graph objects, a topic I covered in a previous article, makes a lot of sense in the long run, Facebook should take advantage of the system they’ve devised for as long as possible.

So what do you think? Do you feel like spending some money on Facebook fan acquisition? Sounds like a great idea to me! Let us know what price you’ve been paying for fans in the comments below.