Facebook and Instagram announce advertising updates to drive sales

Facebook through its blog post released on Tuesday revealed that currently, a single trend is completely reshaping how people discover products, information, and experiences: people are spending more time on mobile and in apps. And being on mobile has influenced how people discover, browse and purchase.

In the US, for example, people are spending the majority (54%) of their time on mobile in mobile apps. Sixty per cent of people on Instagram say that they discover new products on the platform while 75% say that they've taken action after being inspired by a post.

Additionally during the 2015 festive season, nearly 1 in 5 purchases was on mobile, and it's predicted that this year, more than half of people who research travel online will do so on a mobile device.

As people discover information, products and experiences in this fashion, advertising strategies have to change to keep up.

To help businesses do just that, the social media giant announced a variety of product updates on Facebook, Instagram, and the Audience Network to give advertisers new ways to drive sales of their products in more places across mobile and desktop.

They’re expanding functionality for Dynamic adverts (formerly called Dynamic Product adverts) and adding new advanced capabilities to Custom Audiences. These updates help advertisers identify and connect with their most valuable website visitors and mobile app users.

Dynamic adverts for Instagram

To help marketers connect with shoppers in new places, they are extending a product to Instagram that many Facebook advertisers are already using with great success: Dynamic adverts.

Dynamic adverts automate product advertising by showing people adverts featuring items that they've expressed interest in, either by viewing them or adding them to their basket, or items related to ones that they've shown interest in or purchased.

To date, more than 2.5 billion unique products have been uploaded to Facebook. Now, by extending Dynamic adverts to Instagram, advertisers can promote relevant products to shoppers who have browsed their website or mobile app across two platforms where people spend much of their time: Facebook and Instagram. Whilst many advertisers already use Instagram to promote their products, manually tailoring advert creative and targeting for every product in their catalogue is time-consuming. With Dynamic adverts, advertisers can showcase every one of their products automatically with dynamic creative and targeting so that they can show the right product to the right person every time.

To run Dynamic adverts across all of the placements, select Instagram and the Audience Network under "Placement" when creating your Dynamic advert.

Introducing Dynamic adverts for travel

This year, it's predicted that 73% of people in the US will research a trip on mobile. To help travel advertisers connect with people who are planning and booking trips across devices, today Facebook is also extending the power of Dynamic adverts by introducing new travel-specific dimensions, including location and time.

With Dynamic adverts for travel, advertisers can show relevant messages to people who have expressed interest in travelling to specific destinations and during specific dates.

Dynamic adverts for travel empower travel advertisers to offer hotel options to people who have shown interest in taking a trip, either by browsing hotels or by searching for and purchasing a flight. For example, a travel business can connect with people who viewed a hotel on their website by showing them an advert featuring the hotel that they viewed, along with similar hotels in the area. Advertisers can now also help people complete their trips by showing relevant hotels to people who have purchased flights on their website or in their app.

To help advertisers offer people the best experience, the hotel options shown include dynamic availability and pricing, for people to see updated information

Updates to Custom Audiences from your website

The new options in Custom Audiences address the fact that some website visitors are more valuable to a business than others.

For example, if a business knows that someone who visits their website once a week is more likely to make a purchase in the next 30 days, they may focus their efforts on connecting with people who have visited their website in the last week. The updates to Custom Audiences empower advertisers to do just that.

The new targeting options for Custom Audiences from your website are:

• Frequency: how many times someone does a certain thing, such as visiting a page.
• Time spent: how much time someone spent doing a certain thing, such as exploring a website or viewing a specific page.
• Dynamic date: a range of dates that the person has shown interest in, such as for a flight or a hotel reservation.
• Aggregated values: the total amount that a person has spent.
• Devices: these include Android devices, iOS devices, desktop and other mobile devices.

These advanced behaviour criteria enable advertisers to move beyond creating audiences based solely on web page visits and events to being able to segment their audience by the intensity of their interest. Creating audience segments in this way also helps advertisers understand and bid the true value of an action from a person so that they can drive conversions more efficiently across devices.

Over the coming months, the advanced features for Custom Audiences from the website will be rolled out to advertisers who are using Power Editor and the API.

These updates empower advertisers to sell more effectively from Facebook, Instagram, and the Audience Network. With the new features for Dynamic adverts and Custom Audiences from websites, advertisers can share highly relevant messages across devices to encourage people to purchase the things that they've expressed interest in.