The social network is working on appealing to this market through a promise of successful advertising.
In an effort to become more appealing to app development firms, Facebook has been testing an entirely new form of mobile ads service since at least the end of January, which provides advertisements directly to a certain handful of smartphone and tablet applications.
Now, that social network is starting to indicate that an official launch of the service may occur in April.
The suggestion has been made that the mobile ads service could be launched at the F8 developer conference, next month. This would make an offering to all app makers for an entirely new revenue source that had not previously been available through the social media giant. Until now, the platform simply wasn’t in a position to truly assist developers in being able to monetize their apps.
Facebook has now taken its time to develop a mobile ads service that it believes will promise success.
According to Ilya Sukhar, who is responsible for the oversight of developer efforts at Facebook, “That had to be figured out.” He went on to say that “There just generally was a period of time when the company, as has been widely reported, has been figuring stuff out [on mobile]. This is a signal that we think we’ve figured it out.”
He explained that assisting developers in being able to monetize their applications will be a central focus of the announcements that will be made next month at the conference. In the past, the F8s in the past were primarily focused on rolling out features on Facebook that were more consumer facing. This will be different, this year, as developers will be nearly the only focus of the event, according to Sukhar, who also added that it will “help folks build, grow, and monetize their apps.”
Monetizing is one of the largest struggles faced by mobile app development companies. As Facebook has considerable strength in monetizing attention, they are hoping to be able to combine those two environments through their mobile ads service, for mutual benefit between themselves and developers.
Though more consumers are using smartphones than ever before, advertisers aren’t allocating much money to reach them.
SEMPO and Econsultancy have now released the results of a study that they have conducted to better understand mobile marketing from the perspective of companies when compared to the increased use of smartphones and tablets by consumers.
The research was able to come up with a considerable amount of insight regarding digital ads and promotions.
When it came to the impact of the various trends and technologies it was the use of smartphones and tablets that took the cake in terms of affecting SEO, paid search, display advertising, email marketing, and social media marketing. Mobile marketing clearly has a very important role to play according to the opinions of the company respondents to this survey. They stated that they feel that the increased use of these devices by consumers is significant or highly significant in the context of the marketing and advertising efforts that those businesses were making.
This insight could be defining when it comes to the development of future online and mobile marketing campaigns.
In fact, the companies put the use of smartphones and tablets ahead of the Enhanced Campaigns from Google and the changes that were made to AdWords as well the integration with social media when it came to the impact that was made to the overall marketing efforts. Among the respondents, 49 percent said that the use of the devices by consumers was highly significant. Comparatively, the changes made by Google were deemed highly significant by 33 percent.
When it came to the impact of the use of mobile devices by consumers on paid search efforts, 55 percent of the respondents said that it was highly significant, while 38 percent said that it was significant.
The only area in which the ownership of smartphones and tablets by consumers was not seen as having a considerable impact was in the area of search engine optimization (SEO). Although the “not provided” keyword data was considered to be highly significant by over half (52 percent) of the survey respondents.
Clearly, the use of these devices will have companies looking into mobile marketing trends and techniques in order to be able to keep up with the impact that the gadgets are having on current campaigns and efforts.
