Previously, if you were either not a Facebook user or not logged into the social network, then Facebook advertising on third party websites or mobile apps powered by the Facebook Audience Network would not be visible to you. Guess what – that all changes today.
Now, Facebook will help marketers show offsite ads to all users who visit websites and applications in its Audience Network ad network.
With more than 1.6 billion active users who share a range of personal information through its service, Facebook has built a gigantic advertising business that enables companies to drill down into granular detail when targeting the audience they want to reach. That’s changed the game for generating interest in websites, services, app downloads or anything online. Facebook’s Audience Network has already enabled it to extend that reach outside of Facebook to let advertisers find Facebook users while they are not inside the social network, today’s subtle move could hand advertisers the power to reach even more people.
To date, Facebook has only showed ads across its Audience Network to Facebook users, targeted based on information the company has collected about its users’ tastes and behaviors. Now Facebook plans to collect information about all Internet users, through “like” buttons and other pieces of code present on Web pages across the Internet. It will then use the information it collects to target ads to non-Facebook users.
If widely used by publishers and media companies, the new feature could mean Facebook will have a hand in selling and placing a larger portion of offsite ads, which could help it generate additional revenue. By the way, the company generated over $17 billion in ad revenue in 2015.
Some publishers might be wary of handing more of their ad sales operations to Facebook. However, many already rely heavily on the social network to generate traffic for their sites, and some even post content directly to Facebook through Instant Articles.
Non-Facebook users will be able to opt-out of “interest-based” advertising from Facebook, the company said. Facebook members will also be able to opt-out of seeing ads outside of the social platform based on their on-Facebook interests.
Marketers buying advertising across the Facebook Audience Network will have the option to not show ads to non-Facebook users if they wish, but that ad space will be included by default.
