According to a new study from AdRoll in which it looked at one billion impressions, ads featured in the Facebook news feed have 21 times the click-through rate of other re-targeting ads and 49 times the click-through rate of Facebooks right-hand side ads. What sets these ads apart is the fact they sit firmly in Facebook user’s news feeds, among their friends posts and posts from pages they like. This placement increases the ability of the ad to not only be seen and clicked on, but also shared to their friends. This shareability and placement puts these ads in a prime position to not only be seen, but also clicked through to.
In addition to the click-through numbers, this also translated into a cost per click that costs substantially less. According to the study, Facebook news feed ads cost 79 percent less per click than other web retargeted ads, and 54 percent less than sidebar facebook ads. The downside to all of this is that the reach of the ads is limited only to Facebook users instead of the entire web. Google’s AdWords program has more reach than Facebook’s feed advertising, but even still the cost per click is substantially lower and the click-through rate is substantially higher for Facebook.
Facebook uses a policy of retargeting, where specific in-feed ads will be shown to users who have already visited a site for a product, with the goal of bringing them back again. In addition to this, Facebook only sells one of these ads per user per day, meaning that the feed won’t get filled with advertising. This one-a-day policy means the number of ads is low, so it won’t appear incredibly often, but this is important. If users only see a few of these ads instead of being constantly flooded, they are more likely to click through on the ads they do see.
One year ago, advertising on Facebook was a less than perfect solution. It is quickly becoming one of the more effective advertising tools on the Internet today, especially with the use of in-feed advertising.
Source: VentureBeat
