Facebook to streamline different ad products, Offers and Questions are out

Facebook is working on simplifying its different ad units and streamlining its products in an effort to make things simpler for businesses looking to spread the word via the social network, it announced Thursday.

Facebook looked at its 27 different ad products and decided to cut down on the number of options to improve a smaller number, and it said that making ads simpler will be a priority for the company moving forward. Facebook explained the idea in a blog post on Thursday:

“When we work with a marketer, we always start with their business goals, and we are going to do the same thing with our ad products. Our vision is that over time, an advertiser can come to Facebook and tell us what they are trying to achieve, and our ads tools will automatically suggest the right combination of products to help them achieve it.

In the next six months, we plan to streamline the number of ad units from 27 to fewer than half of that while mapping all of our ads to the business objectives marketers care about — be it in-store sales, online conversions, app installs, etc.”

The changes will come in several different forms. One will be cutting down on confusing, duplicated offerings, such as the ability to both ask a Question and to post a question on a page and getting replies in the comments. Another is removing the Offer product, since companies have found that posting an ad to a page works just as well (this change will occur in July). Other changes include automatically adding social context to ads rather than requiring marketers to purchase this seperately, and making ads look more consistant across the platform.

The full explanation of changes can be found in Facebook’s blog post, and will be rolling out over the next few weeks and months.

changes to facebook ads

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