Facebook says it wants to help marketers save money by selling customer analytics based advertisement for digital ads. The social network giant is offering access to its immense customer behavior data marts through a new product, an automation tool termed as Audience Direct.
Understanding Audience Direct
Marketers are currently relying on third party applications to understand customer behaviors. The user segmentation and targeting, however, remains a major concern as Facebook protects customer data.
The impression rates for targeted audience for that purpose remain a problematic areas and cause extra expenses. Audience Direct, however plans to change this as it will contain live data feeds from Facebook’s demographic and location data.
Also Read: Harnessing the Power of Facebook Ads – Part One: Understanding the Basics
Facebook possesses personal data of more than 2.1 billion active users currently. This includes gender, age bracket, interest, common behavior patterns, and likes and dislikes. There are 1.15 billion mobile daily active users (Mobile DAU) for December 2016, an increase of 23 percent year-over-year. The plan to open these insights for publishers is being seen as a long term project by Facebook.
The concerns for many marketers
The media companies have welcomed the idea of the product itself. Business Insider shared opinion of Brian Boland, Facebook’s vice president of publisher solutions:
“This is a problem that we’ve heard about from large video publishers. A publisher might have to deliver 2 million ad impressions just to make sure that an advertiser gets the 1 million targeted ads it commissioned. They end up throwing thousands of dollars out the window. This helps them solve that problem.”
The flip side however is the amount of control that Facebook will have in publishing business. The product will almost ensure that Audience Direct will totally control the business model of the entities that use it. Not every publisher is willing to completely hand over their advertising infrastructure to Facebook. Many of them already have concerned that their revenue pies are losing heavy chunks to Facebook.
Also Read: Ad Revenue: Soon To Emerge As The Only Form Of Facebook Business Model
Facebook says in a recent test that targeted delivery statistics increased to 90 percent from an industry average of 59 percent. Facebook has signed ESPN, Hearst, A+E Networks and Scripps Networks as early test partners for Audience Direct. The initial demo is proceeding without market fees.
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