Damian Routley is Director at Glow Digital Media Limited, a Facebook-buying solution based in London. Here he discusses the possible roll out of sponsored stories on Facebook's mobile channel - and why with 400 million active mobile users FB will end up owning the mobile ad channel.
It seems only right to preface this piece with the following: the only people who know for sure what Facebook’s plans on mobile are, are themselves. And they’re not telling. Every request for confirmation or comment has been ignored, but through informal sources (internal and external) we can make a couple of assumptions.
Firstly, Facebook will monetise their mobile channel. Along the IPO path, the company will need to put in large building blocks of revenue. One of the easiest ways for them to do this is to activate this channel.
Facebook’s mobile audience is huge. In the UK they command over half of all mobile traffic by time and user numbers. In certain Asian markets, mobile penetration massively outweighs fixed internet. And globally, as the S-1 filing attests, they have 425m monthly active mobile users.
Over the past few months, Facebook has been placing a greater emphasis on Sponsored Stories – the ad types surfaced to your friends, triggered by your action (a check-in, like, comment, etc). This format is really effective because it’s not seen as a contrived effort to market to people. The introduction of these in the news feed this year introduced the concept to users so as not to surprise them when ads start appearing on their mobile.
What we know about Sponsored Stories within the news feed is that they’re manipulated to cause minimum intrusion by frequency capping to 1 per day. Because of this, and also because they’re more tuned to the social environment, the feedback is overwhelmingly positive.
As for how they will perform, it’s likely to be positive here too. They’ll come with the rich targeting that Facebook offers now: likes & interest, defined intent as well as demographic. Given the accuracy and portability, we will likely see time & location sensitive ad formats, special offers and coupons. Another extension with a powerful impact could be members getting member-incentivised special offers.
Yes, this method of targeting will likely bring an additional level of complexity to the already difficult ad channel. But in many ways, it’s easier – there’s no need for an ad server, you can buy it through the Facebook ads platform or one of the Ads API vendors. And because it’s likely that your conversion action will be based on Facebook you won’t need to worry about tracking cookies.
This is not a network play either – it’s designed to be a core part of the ecosystem and so performance will suffer if the rest of the ecosystem isn’t included in the plan. So if you’re just offering mobile, you’re missing out on the promoted actions that users will be seeing on Facebook.com.
Facebook ads on mobile will be a game changer. They’ll be one of the largest mobile ads offerings globally, will introduce compelling new formats at such scale that it will shift new and existing mobile dollars to their platform, and because of this they’ll work better than standard mobile display. And they’ll get to this position pretty much overnight. That is, if they do indeed decide to launch mobile as we all predict.