What Is Facebook Audience Network and Why Should Business Owners Care?

You’ll be hard-pressed to find a business owner or marketing manager who hasn’t hopped on board with the value of advertising on Facebook. It’s a marketing behemoth, with 22 percent of the world’s population and 68 percent of US adults using the social media network.

However, if you’re new to advertising on Facebook, you may take the term “Facebook advertising” at face value. Facebook ads only appear in the Facebook newsfeed, the right-hand column, and other places on the platform, right?

WRONG. 

Facebook also shows ads on a variety of other apps and feeds outside of the social media platform itself, including Instagram, Facebook Messenger, and what’s known as the Facebook Audience Network (FAN). You are able to select on which of these platforms your ad shows, in an option called “placements” in Facebook ads manager.

It may seem counter-intuitive to use your Facebook advertising dollars on ads that aren’t even seen on the site, but it’s actually extremely smart to show ads on the audience network.

In this post, you’ll learn what the Facebook audience network is, and why you absolutely need to be using it to your advertising advantage. 

What Is Facebook Audience Network?

To be brief, the Facebook Audience Network is a collection of Facebook-approved mobile apps and websites where ads are shown. The appeal is that:

1. The audience network greatly increases reach.
2. The audience network offers native ads, which essentially up the user experience by making ads not feel so much like… well, ads. 
3. The audience network allows ads to “follow” users across multiple devices and platforms.
4. Enabling the audience network placement will significantly lower your CPR because audience network impressions offer a greater sea to fish out of. 

According to Facebook, 40 percent of the top 500 apps are integrated with audience network, and 80 percent of audience network ads are native, which draw seven times greater cost-per-impression and 20 percent to 40 percent higher revenue per user than its banner ads.

Why Advertise on Facebook’s Audience Network?

The number one reason to advertise on the audience network?

Facebook is running out of space for ads in its news feed.

As more and more businesses are seeing the benefit of advertising on the top social platform, the news feed is becoming more and more clogged with ads–at a certain point, they simply cannot show any more advertisements without decreasing the user’s experience. We started seeing the slowdown back in Q4 of 2016, and Facebook warned that by mid-summer 2017 they would hit a wall.

To counter this, Facebook opened up a variety of new places to put your Facebook ads, including the audience network, Instagram, Messenger, and even subscription-based streaming platforms like Hulu and Apple TV.

For business owners, this means expanding your reach and your ad visibility while lowering your CPR and avoiding possible placement calamities like Google experienced with YouTube.

Oh, did you hear about that? Everyone who’s anyone in the advertising world has heard about the backlash YouTube experienced when advertisers discovered their carefully curated ads were being shown next to hate-speech and extremist propaganda. In fact, AT&T and Verizon both pulled out from the network, saying they’d return when there was a guarantee their ads would not be shown next to controversial and obscene content.

Shortly after the debacle, Facebook grabbed hold of the advertiser pain point and updated its audience network options to do just that. Business owners and advertisers now have the option to select (or deselect) the type of content they want their ads to show next to.

Exclude-able categories include:

• Dating
• Debatable social issues
• Gambling
• Mature
• Tragedy and conflict

Advertising on the Facebook Audience Network with Blue Corona

Even though Facebook audience network ads automatically resize and post to the networks you specify, it sill takes some fine-tuning to make sure your campaign goes off without a hitch. If you’re new to social media advertising we strongly recommend investing in a Facebook marketing partner like Blue Corona. We’re Facebook advertising certified, which means your marketing dollars are in good hands. Contact us today to find out more ways the Facebook audience network can help fulfill your business goals.