Facebook introduces video to its third-party audience network
Video is playing an increasingly important part of Facebook’s revenue stream, with the social network increasingly telling blue-chip advertisers to divert spend away from TV, and on to its properties, with the latest introduction of video inventory to Facebook Audience Network the latest step in this strategy.
To help facilitate such a change in mindset, Facebook has today (16 May) announced it is expanding Facebook Audience Network (FAN) to support more video, meaning that the third-party audience network will now be available to drive brand objectives like awareness and recall, beginning with the number of times an ad is viewed. This is on top of the earlier performance advertising campaigns it was able to optimise towards, such as app installs, etc.
The update also means the video ads booked using FAN will be served as in-stream ad formats either before, during, or after a piece of video content is watched by a viewer on apps and third-party websites.
Additionally, in–article video ads will appear between paragraphs of text and play automatically when at least half the pixels are viewable (for now, in-article ads are only available in Instant Article), with USA Today Sports Media Group & Daily Mail two of the test partners for such ad formats.
Brett Volger, director product marketing, Facebook’s Audience Network, told The Drum that FAN is an increasingly popular method for advertisers to reach Facebook’s billion-plus audience, with Volger describing how the number of publishers choosing the network to monetise their inventory growing 620 per cent in the last year.
Historically, FAN has been performance-led, but the expansion of the number, and type of ad formats helping the unit of Facebook operating at a billion dollar run-rate recently, according to Volger.
“The debut of TV-style pre-roll ads were a big first,” said Volger, adding that FAN is able to deliver accuracy rates of 90 per cent-plus on targeting capabilities on topics such as age and gender, with the current rollout forming part of the social network’s ambitions of capturing more-and-more brand advertising spend.
In addition, Facebook also claims that on average, advertisers that use FAN to target Facebook audiences off the social network increase their incremental reach by approximately 10 per cent, compared to those just using its mobile News Feed alone.
"With more places to deliver content, we can better maximise value for advertisers who want more brand awareness through video," he said, adding that people are now watching more video, with 100 million hours of video being watched on Facebook every day alone.