In an attempt to drive more clicks, and presumably increase revenue, Facebook has added a new “below the fold” ad spot, increasing the number of ads that are displayed on the right-hand site of the site from 3 to 4 ad placements. While a subtle adjustment, this could have a dramatic impact, decreasing the cost of advertising in the short-term thanks to increasing the available inventory by 33 percent.
While we haven’t had time to measure the impact on our own advertisements, we will be monitoring the data over the next few days to see how things perform. Facebook has been making a number of changes to the ad platform in recent weeks including killing off-site conversion tracking, and adding external site URLs.
All these changes are an attempt to improve the overall advertising system in addition to increasing revenue, something that Facebook is obviously focused on as they continue to grow their user base beyond 550 million users. In the meantime, users will see more ads as they navigate around the site, and of course scroll further down the page.
Source: All Facebook
Wednesday, September 29, 2010