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One of the many ways that ads get in front of your eyeballs on Facebook and Instagram is that the social networking giant lets an advertiser upload a list of phone numbers or email addresses it has on file; it will then put an ad in front of accounts associated with that contact information. A clothing retailer can put an ad for a dress in the Instagram feeds of women who have purchased from them before, a politician can place Facebook ads in front of anyone on his mailing list, or a casino can offer deals to the email addresses of people suspected of having a gambling addiction. Facebook calls this a “custom audience.”

You might assume that you could go to your Facebook profile and look at your “contact and basic info” page to see what email addresses and phone numbers are associated with your account, and thus what advertisers can use to target you. But as is so often the case with this highly efficient data-miner posing as a way to keep in contact with your friends, it’s going about it in a less transparent and more invasive way.

Facebook is not content to use the contact information you willingly put into your Facebook profile for advertising. It is also using contact information you handed over for security purposes and contact information you didn’t hand over at all, but that was collected from other people’s contact books, a hidden layer of details Facebook has about you that I’ve come to call “shadow contact information.”

From every ad, users can also steer themselves to an "ads preferences" settings page, where they can tell Facebook not to show them ads based on their inferred affinity for certain categories. Conversely, they can also select categories they are interested in.

Now users who click or tap on the drop-down menu on a Facebook ad and select "Why am I seeing this ad?" will be taken to a brief explanation for why that ad was shown to them. For instance, a user could be told they saw an ad because they're interested in televisions, and that Facebook's inference was based on pages they've liked and ads they've clicked on.

the new targeting is intended to help direct-response advertisers, in particular, to make their Facebook ads more relevant to their selected audience.

In 2016, BuzzSumo analyzed more than 800 million Facebook posts. Based on their findings, posts with less than 50 characters “were more engaging than long posts.” According to another, more precise study by Jeff Bullas, posts with 80 characters or less receive 66 percent higher engagement:

Paid posts: 5 to 18 words Every Facebook ad needs three types of content: a Headline, Main Text, and a Description. After analyzing 37,259 Facebook ads, AdEspresso found that ads did best when the copy in each element was clear and concise. According to the data, the ideal length for a: Headline, the first text people read, is 5 words. Main Text, the snippet above your image or video, is 14 words. Description, the text that lives directly below your headline, is 18 words.

Videos: 30 to 60 seconds With video, one of the primary measures of success is how long people watch, also known as your video retention rate. In 2016, Kinetic Social tracked 2 billion social ad impressions and found that 44 percent of 30- to 60-second videos on Facebook were viewed to completion. Meanwhile, videos that ran under 30 seconds or over two minutes saw completion rates of 26 and 31 percent, respectively. A more recent poll, from 2018, showed that 33 percent of Facebook users preferred to watch shorter videos, from 30 to 50 seconds long.

Facebook is reintroducing Atlas, the underused platform it bought from Microsoft last year.

it will allow them to buy ads on non-Facebook websites and apps, using Facebook targeting data

these ads aren’t “Facebook ads.” But it is also playing up the notion that the ads marketers buy via Atlas will be more effective than other big ad platforms, because they use Facebook’s data.

Multi-product ads enable businesses to showcase three products within a single ad unit, on desktop or mobile. Each product highlighted will have its own image, description, and click target.

Beginning today, multi-product ads are available to advertisers around the world via the Facebook ads application-programming interface. We’ll work to incorporate multi-product ads into our other ads interfaces later this year.

A new feature in Ads Manager and Power Editor allows businesses to easily build certain kinds of audiences — i.e., people who haven’t visited your website in a while, or people who have visited certain pages of your site.

The class action suit, meanwhile, alleges that rather than accepting internal proposals to fix the accuracy problems of “potential reach”, Facebook instead “developed talking points to deflect from the truth”. The tech giant did announce some changes to the ad tool in March 2019 — when it said an advertiser’s campaign’s estimated potential reach “is now based on how many people have been shown an ad on a Facebook Product in the past 30 days who match your desired audience and placement criteria” (versus the estimates being previously based on “people who were active users in the past 30 days”). But the litigants argue that the changes to the tool which displays an estimate to advertisers as they are beginning to create a campaign — and therefore when they’re deciding/considering whether/how much money to spend with Facebook — do not fully fix the issue of the metric not corresponding to the potential audience of people who could see the ad on Facebook.

The video ads, which the company says are still being tested to a limited number of users, will start playing automatically as users scroll through their news feed, the central real estate in Facebook's desktop and mobile platforms. They will initially play without sound; users can stop the ad by scrolling past it in the news feed.

In a November survey of 735 Facebook users by global marketing consultancy Analytic Partners, 83% of users said they would find video ads "intrusive" and would likely "ignore" them.

Subway was among the companies that placed ads containing video that users had to start manually. Mr. Pace of Subway said roughly 88 million people saw the ad and "millions" of people clicked on it. "It worked pretty darn well," he added.

By 2014, “Facebook the big news machine” was in full swing with Trending, hashtags and news outlets pouring resources into growing their Pages. Emphasizing the “news” in News Feed retrained users to wait for the big world-changing headlines to come to them rather than crisscrossing the home pages of various publishers. Many don’t even click-through, getting the gist of the news just from the headline and preview blurb. Advertisers followed the eyeballs, moving their spend from the publisher sites to Facebook.

In 2015, Facebook realized users hated waiting for slow mobile websites to load, so it launched Instant Articles to host publisher content within its own app. Instant Articles trained users not to even visit news sites when they clicked their links, instead only having the patience for a fast-loading native page stripped of the publisher’s identity and many of their recirculation and monetization opportunities. Advertisers followed, as publishers allowed Facebook to sell the ads on Instant Articles for them and thereby surrendered their advertiser relationships at the same time as their reader relationships.

This is how Facebook turns publishers into ghostwriters, a problem I blew the whistle on in 2015. Publishers are pitted against each other as they make interchangeable “dumb content” for Facebook’s “smart pipes.”

We are now going further in our efforts to limit low-quality ads on our platforms by disapproving more of them and reducing distribution for more ads in our auction."

1. Engagement bait These are your typical 'like and share' posts, re-purposed as ads. Facebook has specific rules against using such methods in contests, but they also don't like them in promotions.

2. Withholding information Facebook also dislikes ads which lure clicks by alluding to the full detail of the post without being clear on what that detail actually is.

Advertisers on Snapchat will now have access to goal-based bidding for app install ads, an industry term that means an advertiser can target Snapchat users who are likely to install its app. Snapchat is targeting its app install ads, which ask users to swipe up on full-screen video ads, using machine-learning technology it developed in-house.

Aside from app install ads, Snapchat is also beefing up its ad targeting. For the first time, advertisers can target Snapchat users who have previously interacted with other ads they've previously ran in the app.

if an advertiser buys one of Snapchat's more expensive selfie filters (which the company calls Lenses) for a national campaign, now the buyer can later target those same users again with one of Snapchat's full-screen video ads.

as Page reach and engagement continues to dip for brands, Facebook has made some updates to help deliver value to businesses through Pages beyond just News Feed distribution.

Facebook Page is becoming more like a website for your business — a destination people will come to when they want information, or even make a purchase or booking, as well as a place to engage with great content.

Facebook has made it easier for people to recommend your business by bringing Recommendations to your Page. As shared by Facebook: People will now be able to post a Recommendation for your business including text, photos and tags directly on your Page. And Recommendations will also help you reach people while they’re searching for or talking about your business.

Make the most of these remarkable CTRs by decking out your App Store listing. Optimize for the App Store by writing a winning description, listing key features, including app screen shots, etc.

Instagram user demographics show them to be young millennials, with over half of users between the ages of 18-29.

In a study using over 400 global campaigns, ad recall was 2.8x higher on Instagram sponsored posts than other online advertising mediums. Snail Games saw a 339% lift in app installs using Instagram ad videos (as well as 5x higher in-app purchase rates).

Not even the promise of lower CPMs as a result of less competition was enough to tempt large swaths of advertisers to change their view of the platform last year. But it wasn’t for lack of effort. Snapchat execs pushed the self serve auction model in the U.K. for much of 2018.

Snapchat’s impressions are now the cheapest of its peers, according to the ad buyers interviewed for this article.

ll told, the ephemeral mobile messaging app had a good year in 2018 thanks in part to the arrival of the Snap Pixel. When it launched last summer, the pixel gave its ad business more clout as agencies could go to advertisers with more accurate data based on how Snapchat’s ads drive direct response clicks to websites. Deeper data on what actions Snapchat’s ads drove meant ad buyers could move away from last click attribution models.

"Facebook is establishing itself as a destination for premium video content, and demonstrating a willingness to pay significant amounts of money for that content. Facebook can likely drive revenue growth to offset content costs, albeit at lower margins than what the company currently generates," analyst Brian Wieser wrote in a note to clients Wednesday. "However, because of measurement issues the company has faced in the past (and possibly a new one identified by a trade publication in Australia and replicated by us within the United States), we think the primary winner of Facebook's expansion in video will be third party measurement firms," he added.

Facebook apologized for overstating video viewership times in September last year. The company said a metric for average user time spent on videos was artificially inflated.

The firm's analyst cites Australian trade publication AdNews, which revealed last week "Facebook's claims to reach 1.7mm more 16-39 year-olds in Australia than exist in the country according to its census bureau."

acebook has known for a while that the things its users talk about are supremely interesting and relevant for advertisers. Twitter proved that basing an advertising model around brand mentions really works; Facebook is bound to follow suit. Already, we are seeing Facebook taking steps into Twitter’s territory by showcasing which topics and brands are trending in users’ News Feeds, and by aggregating hashtagged terms

Offline conversion for retailers. Speaking of consumers’ path-to-purchase on Facebook, the ability for retailers to track offline sales conversions from ads viewed on Facebook is another critical step Facebook is taking to give advertisers deeper insight into how their ads actually drive some type of consumer action.

cost-per-click (CPC) is down 2 percent year-over-year and 11 percent quarter-over-quarter, while clickthrough rate (CTR) rose 160 percent YoY and 20 percent QoQ. Facebook ad clicks overall were increased by 70 percent YoY and 48 percent QoQ. Impressions are up 40 percent YoY and 41 percent QoQ.

Comments on ad posts are up 16 percent YoY and 40 percent QoQ; likes are down 4 percent YoY and shares are up 2 percent. Engagement on video is up 25 percent YoY and 58 percent QoQ, showing that auto-play videos haven’t been as toxic as feared. Video plays are up 785 percent YoY and 134 percent QoQ after auto-play videos were implemented in Q4. Nearly 1/4 of all video plays on Facebook happen on Fridays. Posts with images still gain the most engagement, though the percentage of engagement for photo, link and text posts are all down YoY. Posts with links are up 77 percent YoY and 167 percent QoQ, as Facebook has made great strides in making link posts more visual. Most impressions in Q1 came on a Friday, with 15.7 percent of all impressions. Sunday is the least likely day to receive a comment on a post. Facebook referred revenue per visit is up 11 percent year-over-year and 2 percent quarter-over-quarter. Facebook produces 75 percent of traffic to retail sites, up 2 percent year-over-year and 13 percent quarter-over-quarter. Facebook refers 52 percent of social traffic to B2B high tech sites, up 34 percent year-over-year.

CMO Jeff Hennion said it's more cost-effective to drive people there via email, direct mail, or even TV ads that show a link to the Facebook fan page.

A ComScore report last July said 32% of P&G's internet display impressions were "socially published," most of which occurred on Facebook.

Facebook ads need a clear message, a promotion or call to action to be effective. "Delivering traditional brand-building or product messaging simply doesn't work. At all," he wrote in an email.

They’ve abandoned the promise of helping companies genuinely connect with their customers. They’re not even very good at the model they’ve chosen, which is as a Web 1.0 ad seller.

Ads aren’t the focus on what marketers want from Facebook in the first place.

Facebook has completely gone back on what they originally promised marketers in 2007. It’s what they promote today. They sell this promise of connecting companies with their customers. Eighty-four percent of the time they don’t do that.

MoPub offers a comprehensive platform that monetizes ad space on mobile platforms and social media, while providing real-time bidding for prime advertising slots and times. In 2013, the company was purchased by Twitter for $350 millio

Despite the silence from Facebook on the matter, the company has made moves in the past that would indicate at least a desire to further its reach in the mobile advertising market. Last year, Facebook released Audience Network, which is meant to build out its infrastructure and enable advertisers to run Facebook ads on third-party mobile phones. Another such program is Atlas, which tracks users anonymously and provides feedback to advertisers. Facebook has also taken out a patent on a program that would enable advertisers to target only the most “influential” people on social media. Theoretically, these programs would be stitched together as part of any MoPub-like system.

the new social model is simply to harvest social signals and sell personalized ads, however and wherever possible.

The purpose of Facebook’s upcoming mobile ad network is to sell ads outside of Facebook.com and its mobile app. This “multiple app” strategy often accompanies a network’s own app offerings — in Facebook’s case, Messenger, Facebook Camera and Paper. According to Elgan: If Facebook’s direction or strategy isn’t clear, let me spell it out: Harvest personal data from multiple apps, then sell personalized advertising in multiple locations.   Here’s an oversimplified example: An ad for a Starbucks promotion presented to you in a mobile game (sold through Facebook’s upcoming ad network) might be based on knowledge that you spend a ton of time at Starbucks — information harvested from the Moves app.   As you can see, there’s no Facebook — no social network — involved in this series of events. But Facebook gets paid anyway.