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Advertisers Face Some Creative Hurdles With FBX In The News Feed

fbxFacebook has raised the velvet rope to let more of its real-time bidding partners into the News Feed, and by many accounts the response rates are stunning. But some technical and ad quality issues still need to be ironed out.

Beta partner TellApart says click-through rates for Facebook Exchange ads in the News Feed are as much as 80 times higher than right-rail ads. Said another way, an advertiser could buy News Feed ad space at 1/80th the volume of Facebook's "Standard" right-rail ads and still get the same total click volume in the two venues.

But a total integration of FBX with the News Feed will take time, and advertisers have much to learn about designing retargeting ads that speak to the content mindset of Facebook users.

Dynamic Creative

The first (and most easily solved) issue revolves around robust dynamic creative personalization, which is not yet possible in the News Feed.

Today, Facebook's Standard (i.e. right-rail) ads support third-party creative decisioning and let advertisers swap out a number of creative variables. Those variables include Title, Body, Link, Image and View Tags. All of these can be decisioned when an advertiser bids, and then rendered when the winning impression is served.

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Condé Nast Aims Chute Ads At 'Creative Fatigue'

Ranvir Gujral, ChuteA collaboration between Condé Nast and social images aggregator Chute has led the startup to create its first advertising product, designed to use consumers' photos as backgrounds for marketers' messages.

Chute Ads will make their first appearance on Condé Nast Traveler's site next month with an as-yet-unidentified marketer. While neither Condé Nast executives nor Chute will discuss the finished Chute Ads product, the idea is intended to let users willingly have their photos featured within a standard banner ad.

In an interview with Chute co-founder Ranvir Gujral and Craig Kostelic, digital advertising director for CNT, the two told AdExchanger that the use of real-time photo streams in ads are meant to encourage more direct contact with brands and reduce the reliance on click-throughs as a metric that an ad was viewed.

"We see the amount of time that people are spending on social," Kostelic said. "The question for publishers like us has long been, 'How do we take that organic behavior and how do we put that into our environment in a way that will be interesting for brands and readers?'"

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FBX Gets More News Feed Inventory And Dynamic Creative Options

fbxWell, that was fast. Six weeks after making some News Feed ad inventory biddable to Facebook Exchange advertisers on a trial basis, Facebook is expanding the amount of that precious paid media space that it will expose to RTB demand.

The News Feed trial was initially open to just three of Facebook's 17 FBX partners. Those early beta partners were MediaMath, TellApart and Nanigans. With the new expansion (still in beta), marketers now have the option to work with the other 14.

Facebook didn't immediately say how much total News Feed inventory it would float on its ad exchange, or how much News Feed space it intends to preserve for its native social advertising products. But one thing is sure: the new FBX placements perform better than the right rail ads to which they were previously confined.

As TellApart CEO Josh McFarland told AdExchanger when the beta launched in March, "Getting in the News Feed is like getting on anyone's personalized NYT front page."

Facebook also signaled plans to enhance dynamic creative optimization of FBX campaigns. Its blog post notes, "We are working on integrating FBX real-time dynamic creative functionality (highly-customized and/or optimized ad creatives that allow on-the-fly creative modification) for the Link Page Post Ad Format." Link Page Post Ads are Facebook ads that drive users to off-site landing pages.

FBX advertisers can already use product-specific creative. In a protocol document dealing with dynamic creative, Facebook explains, "The FBX partner is allowed to override one, some, or all the fields on an adgroup (image, title, body, link URL). The information is passed via special fields in the bid response, and is subject to the same length limitations as regular ad copy."

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Facebook Sees Mobile Ad Gains In Q1, Says No Ad Network Plans For Atlas

Zuckerberg and Sandberg, CEO, COOFacebook's mobile ad growth was the big story in Q1, as ads served to handheld devices grew to 30% of all advertising revenue. Read the earnings release, or check out these highlights on the ad side:

  • Total ad revenue grew 43% to $1.25 billion
  • Mobile accounted for roughly 30% all Facebook ad dollars in Q1, while desktop revenue was flat year-over-year
  • Ad impressions were up 39%
  • Advertising makes up 85% all Facebook revenue, with payments and other fees producing a meager $213 million during the period

Some of that growth is due to the continued build-out of Facebook Exchange and the expansion of targeting tools like its Custom Audiences product. At the start of the analyst call, Zuckerberg focused primarily on mobile and credited bringing the Open Social Graph to mobile – as well as the addition of Mobile Install Ads, which promote discovery of new apps – with revenue growth in that area.

COO Sheryl Sandberg called out Facebook Exchange, the company's Atlas acquisition (which closed last week), and its work with Datalogix to link online ads to offline purchases. Also announced during the quarter were Custom Audiences and Partner Categories, which let advertisers match Facebook's audience to data from third-party providers like Acxiom and Epsilon.

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Salesforce.com Ties CRM Data Into Social Ads With Social.com

Salesforce-Social.ComSalesforce.com introduced today a new addition to its Marketing Cloud – Social.com, which allows marketers to apply their CRM and social listening data to their social ad campaigns. Creating targeted ads, marketers frequently run into the “silo issue” of being unable to connect their various customer data sources, noted Gordon Evans, VP of marketing at Salesforce.com.

“We wanted to help our clients take the information that’s living in Salesforce,” Evans told AdExchanger, “and connect that to their other customer databases to create segmented and targeted ad campaigns that they can update in a self-service solution.”

With Social.com, an ad agency can access Facebook’s Custom Audiences tool on the Social.com dashboard to create and deliver messages – such as Sponsored Stories – to various groups on its client’s behalf. If the client was Ford, for example, the marketer “might have [from the company’s Salesforce CRM system] a group of folks that filled out an online form on Ford’s page and another group that bought a Ford Focus more than five years ago,” Evans noted.

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Facebook's Self-Serve News Feed Ads Get Less Precise

Facebook Self-ServeFacebook may be pouring on the revenue afterburners while reducing the precision of self-serve ad targeting in the news feed. Or, if you're Facebook, the latest changes are all about making it simpler for the advertising long tail.

As many of you may know, AdExchanger reaches out through your Facebook news feed by posting links to our AdExchanger website content on our Facebook fan page, which you have (hopefully) "liked."  Because this will reach only a limited audience of likers, we often "amplify" that message through Facebook. This means we buy paid media through Facebook's self-service ad tool and the little promotion button you see on the Facebook post itself. This delivers the post into your news feed.

promote

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Facebook Boosts Mobile Tools At Mobile Developer Conference

Facebook-DougPurdyFacebook unveiled features to help developers enhance their apps at its Mobile Developer Conference in New York City today. Among the changes are features designed to ease concerns about data sharing.

Noting that users can be wary of giving third-party apps access to their profile data via Facebook login, the company now enables brands to further clarify which data they are accessing.

“We made the decision to separate when you can ask a user for permission to personalize their experience on your app from asking for permission to post on their behalf,” explained Director of Product Doug Purdy. “This way users can feel more secure.” Brands that tested this feature saw a 5% increase in their login conversions, claimed Facebook.

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Facebook Rolls Out CPA Bidding For Hard Core Direct Marketers

FB-CPAFacebook is rolling out Cost Per Action (CPA) bidding through its Ads API, the first time it has departed from CPM- and CPC-based ad pricing. The move is yet another attempt by Facebook to capture the performance marketing spend (see also: FBX retargeting, offline data matching, App Install ads) that continues to be the main driver of growth in digital advertising.

Until now, Facebook advertisers could only run campaigns on a CPM or CPC basis. CPA delivers more predictability of ad spend by setting a price cap for certain types of desirable actions. Facebook will then optimize ad placements to deliver ads to users it believes are likely to convert on those actions.

With today's global launch, bidding is restricted to three action types: Likes, Offer Claims and Link Clicks. But Facebook says it will eventually add all actions possible on its platform, including app installs, video views, comments, shares and so on.

Readers may wonder what distinguishes a CPA for "link clicks" from a CPC buy. Facebook argues the difference lies in its existing definition of CPC, which is a click anywhere within an ad. That could include a click to a Facebook page, to an external site, or to a separate action such as "comment" or "share." With CPA bidding for "link clicks," advertisers can pay only for traffic to a specific external landing page.

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Considering Twitter's Programmatic Ad Strategy

programmatic-twitterHow Twitter will enter into the programmatic ad business remains a mystery to many.  During the past few months, rumors have swirled over some sort of Twitter ad exchange to be launched. How that will happen is unclear.

Nevertheless, various strategic directions seem possible as Twitter tries to siphon growing programmatic media ad spend.  The answer may lie somewhere between cookies and hashtags.  Here are a few ideas for the Twitter executive team to ponder...

The Hashtag Exchange

No doubt Twitter would like to offer something all-new in the programmatic media business. How about "The Hashtag Exchange?" This could leverage the real-time aspects of Twitter's platform as well as the user's penchant for adding hashtags to their microblog posts.

How it could work: Much like targeting overlays created in mobile advertising, where cookies are being replaced by latitude and longitude coordinates or device ID signals, Twitter (think Google-owned and -operated sites), the Twitter Ad Network (think Google AdSense - see below) and other hashtag-minded publishers could offer inventory to the exchange and allow users to be targeted by either the hashtag keyword or a taxonomy that maps to hashtags. The Hashtag Exchange might bring to life those trillions of tags appended to posts and articles across the Web.

The exchange could be contextual or behavioral, targeting web pages with certain hashtags or certain taxonomies (privacy-friendly). Or, with cookies, the exchange could target users who created those hashtags or come in contact with those taxonomies and are tracked/targeted across the Web.

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