By Elena Zanone

Yesterday Facebook announced plans to streamline its ad products by simplifying its offerings and eliminating advertising cross-over after an influx of feedback from marketers. From these changes, users will see a more standard set of ads, as the social network intends to reduce its twenty-seven different ad units to less than half of that in the next six months.

“We noticed that many ad units accomplish the same goals, so we’re cutting out these redundancies. This includes removing the Questions product for Pages because marketers can simply ask a question in a post and get answers in comments,” said the company in their blog.

Facebook Ads Product Manager Fidji Simo told reporters that advertising on Facebook would be switched around completely. Instead of an advertiser indicating it wants to create a Like post ad or Sponsored story, it can indicate that it is trying to drive more traffic to its website, or that it desires a mobile app install ad, or it is going for more foot traffic or conversions.

Essentially, the overall ad campaign goal will be the first thing an advertiser indicates, not the type of ad model. Some potential examples of the objectives Facebook can offer are to drive awareness of a message, drive views of a video, drive Likes, drive online sales, or drive people in-stores with coupons, and more.

“What we really want to do is reduce redundancies and make sure that there is one clear path for every advertiser that wants to achieve an objective… We’ve worked really, really closely with marketers, and we actually learned from them about what is working for them.”

Instead of having to create three separate types of ads to achieve an objective, these types will be combined:

For example, posting a question ad doesn’t necessarily drive much engagement, but with Facebook’s new capabilities this type of ad can be rolled into a photo ad that is much more eye-catching to users.

The company’s Director of Product Marketing Brian Boland noted, “From audience selection, to targeting and choosing the right people that matter to you, to the actual creative ad format — if we make those steps easier, that actually improves user experience. There’s a better piece of creative and a more relevant piece of creative in front of that person. As we do everything, we really focus on the user experience in the News Feed.”

“In the coming weeks and months, marketers will start to see these streamlined changes to our ads solutions. We think these updates will make it easier for them to do what they do best: reach the right groups of people with the right message and drive the results they care most about,” the company said.

Source: Facebook