So, Facebook is planning on doing some more targeting – demographic, behavioral, what-have-you – to serve more relevant ads to its userbase. Great. (Although we already knew this.) Some are calling this smart; I’m thinking it’s more predictable than anything, given the state of the online advertising market.
But the really smart bit about Facebook’s ad units isn’t the targeting, although the targeting’s necessary. It’s the format and placement. Facebook’s ads are designed to look very much like ordinary Facebook content, nestled in the user’s own news feed – and that is one of the four ways to get attention from an increasingly ad-resistant audience. (For now, anyway.)
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Greg – indeed, putting ads in amongst content and/or making them look like part of the site have been a sure-fire way of improving performance. When advertisers do it, publishers don’t necessarily like it, however… I recall a wonderful placement we had running at a previous company for several months until MSN saw it and flipped out (the same reasons that people clicked on it were probably the reasons that MSN kept missing it when they looked at their own page). Was nice while it lasted though…
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