Facebook’s announcement of their News Feed redesign yesterday represents an important milestone in their product evolution and headlines a major shift in social, as user experiences have become decidedly more visual and mobile-centric. Pinterest and Instagram have been the poster children of this trend, and Facebook recently declared themselves a mobile-first company with over 680 million monthly active users accessing the platform via mobile devices.
Page Post Ads are powerful way for advertisers to engage Facebook users with their brand. What makes these ad types so effective is that they blur the line between advertising and content. Page Post Ads promote posts that may or may not appear on an advertiser’s Facebook Page and can be created as a status update, photo, video, Facebook question, or shared link.
Facebook announced that Page Like ads would begin appearing in the newsfeed (initially only on mobile devices, but shortly followed by desktop) last month. This ad unit, geared exclusively towards fan acquisition, hails from the pre-sponsored story days where standard domain, event, and page like ads on the right-hand side were effectively the only paid media options on the platform. The social network itself reports seeing “over eight times the engagement for ads in the news feed versus the right-hand side.”
With the help of Ampush’s marketing solutions LivingSocial was able to achieve a 58% ROI through Domain Sponsored Stories and Custom Audiences and 60% lower CPC than their previous Facebook efforts.
Not all ad space is created equal, especially on Facebook. Ad performance varies based on the time of day an ad is shown, its placement on the site, and which users it is being showed to. To allow brands to effectively target users that are likely to engage with their ads, Facebook introduced Premium Ads in 2012.