Official Facebook Ads Announcement
November 6, 2007
Mark Zuckerberg unveiled Facebook Ads today in New York. As described in the press release Facebook Ads encompasses three advertising sectors: ads targeted at members based upon profile data (Social Ads), third party ads displayed within the News Feed (Beacon), and an interface for collecting marketing-rich anonymous demographics data relating to peoples’ activity (Insight).
Social Ads have been long awaited by many third party developers taking advantage of the Facebook Platform. While the platform offers a great opportunity at finding an audience for various applications and widgets, many developers have had a difficult time finding ways of monetizing these applications. Social Ads is intended to provide the support these developers have been seeking.
Dave Morin states the following regarding Social Ads in the Facebook Developers News Feed.
When you advertise your application using Social Ads we will add social context to your ad by showing users which of their friends have added your application. This enables you to purchase trusted recommendations of your application to ensure users understand which of their friends have installed your application.
Websites taking advantage of Beacon can determine the most appropriate set of actions relevant to their sites that users can in turn distribute through Facebook. For example, when a user posts an item for sale, completes a purchase, or gets a video game’s high score on third party websites, these sites can prompt the user inviting them to share those activities with their friends on Facebook. Friends will be able to view these stories through News Feed or Mini-Feed stories.
Facebook has already partnered with over 40 major companies’ websites for Project Beacon, including eBay, Blockbuster, Gamefly, and Sony Pictures.
More information about Facebook Ads can be found in the Facebook Developers Wiki.
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3 Responses to “Official Facebook Ads Announcement”
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I’ve been experiencing a big problem with Facebook’s new Social Ads. In fact, they are clearly scamming people’s money.
The Ad program is supposed to allow anyone to create an Ad and target by: Location, Gender, Age and relationship status. After this, you can choose how you want pay - per click or impression - followed by a maximum price you want to pay. All good up to this point.
Now the problem: I set my target location as “Hamilton, ONâ€, Ages 19-34. My ad should ONLY be appearing in this Network for that demo only. However, my ad is appearing in profiles for “No Networks†and “Calgary, AB†networks.
These are the two I have tested. If this is the case, its only reasonable to assume my ads are showing up in every other Network on Facebook as well, jacking up my costs and WASTING my impressions and money!
There is NO contact available on Facebook to deal with this. The best I could find was Corporate Advertising contact, who responded to me, only to say he only deals with $25k clients and could not help.
Can anyone do something about this? I don’t think most people are aware their ads are NOT being targeted and losing their money with almost every click or impression.
Help please.
You can email me at: mike.kassar at gmail . com
Thanks for sharing, Mike. From what I’ve read, you’re not the only one reporting this kind of problem. Hopefully Facebook will address and resolve this issue quickly, for both their sake and users like you.