Facebook Placement Targeting Quickly Gaining Traction
A couple of months ago we announced the capability within Marin Software to target Facebook ads to either the right-hand channel or the News Feed—and you can further target either the News Feed on desktop or mobile devices. Along with this functionality come more granular campaign controls and some interesting performance statistics for each placement type.
Among advertisers on Marin Software, we have seen higher click-through rates (CTR) for ads served on the mobile News Feed versus desktop ads. TBG Digital, a global marketing and technology company specializing in Facebook advertising and social media, is seeing similar results. They just released their Global Facebook Advertising Report for the third quarter of 2012 highlighting the following metrics:
“. . .this quarter sees Mobile News Feed ads receiving CTRs almost 23 times that of ‘Desktop News Feed + Right Hand Side’ ads (1.290% versus 0.057%). Targeting Desktop and Mobile News Feed together fares even better with a CTR of 1.468%.”
However, even with the higher CTR for mobile News Feed ads, Marin continues to observe higher costs per click (CPC) for ads targeting mobile News Feed versus ads targeting mobile and desktop News Feed. This appears to be a result of the limited advertising space on mobile devices, which limits the number of impressions for mobile News Feed ads. We’ll likely see these trends continue to fluctuate as this feature has only been live for a few months.
Who knows, Facebook may even break out mobile into Smartphone and Tablet devices in the future to further refine placement targeting. In any event, we’ll continue to track these performance statistics to see how the market plays out as more advertisers adopt these different targeting options.
