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Facebook Ads Now Offer Great Alternative to Google Display, Other Networks.

Jon Cogan

Facebook has been in the business of offering pay-per-click and CPM display ads to run within targeted users’ newsfeeds for some time. They canalso show ads on Instagram as well as third party websites to users that are logged into Facebook. But now Facebook will be offering advertising products that can target non-Facebook users on other websites and apps. This puts them in direct competition with Google Adwords Display products, and it’s a competition Facebook feels they can win. Easily.

Firstly, there is a great deal of concern about Google’s Display Ads and click fraud. While Facebook has also been accused of using click farms, it can clearly be avoided by not including click farm regions such as the Phillipines or Indonesia. With Google, it’s the click fraud issue seems to be a lot deeper and more concerning.  Countless advertisers have complained of seeing Google Display traffic to their site that lasts less than a second and bounce rates of 100% while all other traffic sources, paid or organic produces nothing of the sort and convert at a much greater rate.  This has not been the case with Facebook’s advertising products so right there, this new offering is exciting! The big difference I see is that while Google has been more concerned with getting more and more advertisers to their extremely flawed platform in an effort to drive up bid prices, Facebook is concentrating on providing more and more highly relevant targeting options.

Facebook plans to offer advertisers the same types of targeting of non-Facebook users as it currently does to Facebook users by utilizing data from cookies that follow web surfers wherever they go on the Web. Andrew Bosworth, Facebook VP of Ads and Business Platform recently told the Wall Street Journal “Our buttons and plugins send over basic information about users’ browsing sessions. For non-Facebook members, previously we didn’t use it. Now we’ll use it to better understand how to target those people.”

Facebook’s new offering will also go head-to-head with other ad networks like Adblade, Chitika  and Taboola that serve up ads on various websites. Facebook is in a position to win that too as it plan on focusing on enforcing stricter guidelines to advertisers so that ads don’t link to the annoying popups and slow loading ads we have become accustomed to with these other networks.

Bosworth posted this on the Facebook Newsroom Blog:

We’ve all had this experience. You open a news article on your phone’s web browser and the page takes unusually long to load. Once it appears, the article is blocked by an ad. You might see a tiny “x” to hide the ad, but if you tap in the wrong spot, you get redirected to an app store or another website. It can be unclear who’s behind the ad or even if the website you’ve been directed to is safe to visit.

Advertising may be here to stay, but bad advertising like this doesn’t have to. That’s why we’re working to provide a better online advertising experience for everyone: people, publishers, and advertisers.

While more than a hundred companies already serve interest-based advertising on websites and apps today, we offer a better experience because we care about the integrity of Facebook ads.

Ads are reviewed against our standards and to ensure they are as respectful of people’s experience as possible. For example, we don’t permit ads that include sound unless you interact with them and we prohibit deceptive ads and ads for unsafe products and services. We’ve developed technology to determine when someone clicks on an ad on a mobile device by accident, so you don’t get taken to a website or app you didn’t mean to visit.

We also offer everyone controls over the ads they see, including tools to opt out of online interest-based advertising. If you have an account, you can do this directly from your Facebook settings, and we honor your choice wherever you use Facebook.

Bosworth believes that since Facebook owns huge amounts of data on a great number of the world’s population, that they are in a leading position to be able to use this behavioral data to serve highly targeted ads, even to non-users.

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