Back in May 2014, Facebook introduced its Audience Network advertising option, enabling advertisers to extend their Facebook advertising campaigns beyond Facebook and into affiliated apps via banner, interstitial and native app placements. Now, Facebook's introducing a new metric to help advertisers better place their ads, and provide more transparency in the ad process, called 'Advertiser Outcome Score'.
From the official announcement:
"Historically, ad networks have rewarded clicks and CTR as the primary metrics publishers should care about. Our system is different - we pay publishers based on the outcomes they create for advertisers. We have heard from publishers that they want to know how best to optimize in our system, and we are committed to giving our partners actionable insights so that they can grow their businesses."
Essentially, the new system evaluates publisher ad placements and provides a rating on their ability to drive outcomes for advertisers - the better your rating, the more likely you'll attract more advertisers to your app, and thus, more ad revenue.
Achieving Better Outcomes
Advertiser Outcome Score will be viewable in the Audience Network dashboard, with the score for each placement based on a scale where "one is the floor and there is no upward limit because as publishers optimize their placements, there is no cap on how well an individual placement can perform".
Facebook notes that they consider a strong score to be eight or above.
"Placement performance is evaluated frequently and as a score improves, CPMs also increase, which can lead to higher revenue for each ad served."
The measurement gives advertisers more insight into what they can expect from specific ad placements, enabling them to make a better informed judgment on where to spend their ad dollars.
Publisher Incentive
The flip side of this offering it that it gives publishers more motivation to find optimal ad placement options for ad content within their apps. Currently, native ads represent over 80% of impressions in the Audience Network, and Facebook takes the opportunity to highlight native placements - and considering different options for such placements - as an area to consider for hosts.
"For example, global Android developer Cheetah Mobile's app-lock placement featured a native ad that mimicked a standard banner placement at the bottom of the app's page. To improve performance and help boost their score, they implemented a native horizontal scroll unit that utilizes rich images, resulting in a 150% increase in conversions and 200% increase in eCPMs."
The introduction of the new metric is an interesting option for The Social Network and will likely prove to be a valuable addition to Audience Network ad placement process.