Facebook’s New Approach to Advertising

Facebook has simplified and now they have officially reached a new milestone. Facebook has come a long way since its banner ads back in 2004. What we have learned in recent days is that Facebook is approaching advertising in a “less-is-more” approach, nearly cutting its line of advertising products in half. On Tuesday, as reported on TIME, Facebook announced that it has 2 million “active advertisers,” defined as advertisers who have placed an ad in the last 28 days.

This is an impressive milestone, given that it’s only taken Facebook less than 2 years to double its numbers from 1 million advertisers in 2013.

What has been attributed to their success? According to Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg, it’s Facebook’s whole new approach. By making their ad products easier to understand and targeting specifically to small businesses, Facebook has made it much simpler for advertisers to get in the game. In addition, many advertisers are attracted to the site simply because of the sheer volume of users it brings in: 1.3 billion. It also doesn’t hurt that instead of asking business owners, “where do they want to begin with their advertising?” Facebook has streamlined its ad process by placing opportunities to “boost” a post, for example, which has helped advertisers understand where their opportunities are.

Last week, it was reported on Mashable that Facebook announced its newest set of tools called Product Ads. These new tools will help marketers effectively reach Facebook’s 1.4 billion users in a new, automated way.

Here’s how Facebook’s Product Ads will work: Marketers will have the ability to upload their product catalogs and manually create ad campaigns. The idea is that Facebook will take care of the ad targeting by automatically creating campaigns and targeting various users based on interests, general location, and whether or not they’ve recently visited the advertiser’s app or website.

What’s more, advertisers will have the ability to advertise several products at once in a carousal of content (up to five products). For advertisers who have a high inventory of attractive products, this will prove to be a great opportunity to attain some reach and increase the odds of customer purchases. It’s also a potential win for Facebook as well since that’s where a majority of the company’s revenue comes from advertising on mobile and desktop.

Credit: Facebook.com

While Facebook continues to push their advertising, they will continue to promote Pages as a free, simple alternative to a website. In order for marketers to acquire any reach with their website alternative, they will need to, “pay to play.” As Facebook advertising continues to grow, we predict Facebook will be promoting video as a very inviting medium for advertisers in the near future as well.