Top 3 highlights for mobile marketers from Facebook’s ‘F8′
Nearly 66 per cent of Facebook’s advertising revenue last quarter came from mobile ads and this quarter it’s been pegged to be higher. It is hence no wonder that most of the social major’s blockbuster announcements last week at the Facebook Developer Conference (F8) were related to the mobile ecosystem. They might later become hits or misses but full points to the Zuckerburg and co. on the sheer boldness of these moves.
For the mobile planet, three announcements that we should look out for are as follows:
Facebook Analytics for Apps
Facebook announced a free to use analytics platform for apps, which allows app publishers to assess usage of their platform across multiple devices. While it helps to aggregate demographics about people using the app, it also helps to understand how different groups of people are interacting with the platform by separating them into funnels, cohorts and segments. This would mean it would arguably compete in the same category as other in-app analytics tools such as Google Analytics, Flurry, Mixpanel and Localytics. However, the most interesting bit was when FB announced that Analytics for Apps will also measure ad performance to show the value of current campaigns and how to improve them in the future. The company said it will soon provide marketing insights for ads outside of Facebook’s network, displaying metrics under the tool’s single dashboard. One would believe this to be a bold step by Facebook towards gaining market share, since it might alienate their long term mobile measurement partners like Kochava, Adjust, Appsflyer or probably vice versa.
LiveRail is now an Ad Exchange
The other big announcement by Facebook was that LiveRail, the supply side platform it bought out last year would now expand its capabilities to mobile display advertising, which would mean publishers can use the technology to sell both video and display ads on their mobile apps. This announcement should typically be deemed as an alert for Google and Twitter, since Google already offers DoubleClick and Twitter has MoPub, both of which operate as similar ad exchanges. As an affiliate service, the LiveRail ad exchange would use Facebook’s anonymised user data to help publishers serve better targeted advertising on platforms that are not Facebook. This would help to significantly decrease publisher’s reliance on cookies and use Facebook’s user data to get a better idea of who’s watching their ads.
Facebook Messenger is now a platform
Facebook Messenger will cease to be just an app. Rather, it will morph into a platform and app developers will be able to build features meant to be Live within Messenger, while brands and publishers will now be able to access consumers through it. More than 40 companies—including ESPN, Pic Stitch and The Weather Channel—have already developed third-party apps for Messenger. Photos from Weather’s mobile app can now be easily shared through the app. And sports fans can now send highlights from ESPN through the Messenger. Messenger will suggest certain apps to download, providing developers with a new avenue for driving downloads and, potentially, a new venue for Facebook to serve app download ads.
It would more interesting for ecommerce and business apps since by integrating with Facebook Messenger they would be able to send receipts and shipping updates for products their consumers buy on the Messenger.
Facebook seems to have become more resolute than ever this time, and has made some audacious moves to define its territory. Whether its ingesting publisher’s media or providing tools for publishers to embed media posted to Facebook, the social network, is trying to make sure that more, if not all, media flows through its properties in some form.
