Last week, AdAge Digital wrote a thought-provoking piece on the validity of ad-tech evaluations — sometimes referred to as “bake-offs.” A couple days later, Nanigans wrote a similar opinion piece questioning the effectiveness of bake-offs and asserting that these tests are ruining the ad-tech industry. But we love bake-offs! As one of Facebook’s fastest growing PMDs, bake-offs help us prove ourselves as the best… even if we are not the biggest.
Five years from now, Graph Search will have won the search war. Not because it’s going to have better algorithms than Google, or have better reviews than Yelp or Foursquare; but because unlike those services Facebook is a platform and not a provider. The future value of Graph Search is only going to be as strong as the providers that utilize Open Graph.
The recent announcement of Facebook Home has the potential to be a game changer for advertisers on the social platform. Facebook Home replaces a standard Android’s home screen and lock screen with an immersive Facebook Cover Feed featuring constant full-screen photos, status updates, and notifications. The deeper mobile integration of Facebook Home could help the company not only attract more advertisers, but also provide more compelling ad products.
Yesterday Facebook held a much-anticipated press conference to announce its latest product, Graph Search. Unveiled as a Facebook-specific tool to find answers to your queries, Graph Search delivers a set of people, places, photos, or other content that’s been shared on Facebook. Executives assured the press that privacy considerations are at the forefront of Graph Search, and it will never serve results that cannot already be found by browsing Facebook the old fashioned way.
Facebook recently announced a new self-service tool to both track and optimize downstream conversions outside of the Facebook platform. Advertisers will need to place a small chunk of unique code on the webpage a user will hit after taking a desired action and define the conversion on Facebook as an “add to cart,” “checkout,” “registration,” or other conversion type. These conversions will then be tied back to specific ads on Facebook, much the way onsite conversions such as “likes,” “app installs,” and “credit spends” are currently tracked. Conversions will be attributed back to the appropriate ads for 28 days following the click.