Tag: smartphone advertising

The social media giant is broadening its Audience Network outside the reach of its platform.

Facebook has announced that it is expanding its Audience Network to make it possible to deliver interest based mobile ads to smartphone and tablet users who either aren’t members of its social media platform and to those who simply aren’t signed in.

The goal is to be able to further solidify Facebook’s position as the second biggest mobile advertising network.

According to the social network, it will be able to obtain enough usable data about non-Facebook users or users who aren’t logged in, through its own technology, to make it possible to generate relevant interest based mobile ads to serve to those individuals. Those mobile ads will be displayed to smartphone and tablet users via various apps and partner sites.

This is accomplished through the Facebook Audience Network (FAN), which was initially created in 2014 and makes it possible for mobile marketers to place targeted ads in Facebook’s signature style onto various mobile friendly partner sites and apps.

These interest based mobile ads will help to keep Facebook just behind Google in smartphone advertising.

According to Facebook, among all the impressions received on FAN, 80 percent of them are native. Within the mobile app ecosystem, Facebook has said that 6 percent of all time users have spent on mobile applications is on apps that are partners in the FAN. Back at the start of this year, the social network announced that Q4 2015 had a $1 billion annual revenue run rate. Comparatively, that same figure for Google Network was $4.14. Though Facebook still has less than a quarter of the Google mobile ad revenue, it is still the next closest to that top spot.

Among FAN’s strong points is that it is able to glean granular data from Facebook users, of which there are 1.6 million actively using the platform around the world. That said, it can now step beyond that specific group of people and may be able to strategically obtain data of the right quality in order to ensure that the targeting accuracy will remain high.

Recently, Andrew Bosworth, the Facebook vice president of ads and business platform explained the importance of interest based mobile ads. He said that “One of the things we’ve heard from people is that many of the ads they see are annoying, distracting or misleading. We think companies can do better, and that’s why we’ve been focused on improving ads both on and off Facebook.”

The two companies will advertise to people who order drug refills and who visit their doctors.

Smartphone advertising firm, 4Info, has just joined up with Crossix, a pharmaceutical data company, in order to test mobile ads within the market of patients who have either visited their doctors or have ordered refills of their prescription medications.

The goal of this partnership is to determine the level of influence mobile advertising can have in this space.

The new partnership will work to measure the level of influence of mobile ads when they are delivered to people who are visiting a medical specialist or having a prescription filled. The new strategic relationship between the two companies is being made to gauge the potential of mobile devices when carefully targeting consumers within the space of the highly regulated health care industry. This has been among the goals of 4Info for some time, as it has been seeking a strategic partner for stepping into the pharmaceuticals market.

The key is to make sure there is an appropriate balance between the timing and industry regulations for the mobile ads.

According to Tim Jenkins, the CEO of 4Info, “Pharma is a huge opportunity.” Before his company partnered up with Crossix in this effort, it had previously been working with advertisers in the pharmaceutical industry in the area of targeting advertisements for non-prescription medications, through the data available via loyalty card programs.

To be clear, no medical data is used by Crossix in order to identify a specific disease or condition that an individual is treating. This will not be the nature of the mobile advertising strategy pursued by the two companies in the partnership. Instead, it obtains information from healthcare data distributors as well as individual businesses. With an analysis of that data, it determines the likelihood of a specific individual for a certain health affliction based on the non-prescription drug purchases that person has made along with the use of a loyalty card, information from prescription refills through retail pharmacies, or medical claims data that suggests a doctor has been seen.

The outcome is that, by way of data models, the companies will be able to make certain educated hypotheses as to what type of conditions each consumer could potentially have. Beyond that, 4Info tracks mobile device locations when certain apps are opened in order to determine whether or not the user is at home. When a location has been decided to be a user’s home location, targeted mobile apps based on the assumptions about that individual will be issued.