Facebook is bringing its relatively new Exchange ads to your desktop news feed in an alpha test that will expand the scope of the re-targeted ads that Facebook launched out of beta last September.
Facebook Exchange, or FBX, lets advertisers target ads to users with a cookie-based real-time bidding platform. Before today, those ads only appeared on the right-hand side of you desktop news feed (and they’ve been doing pretty well).
“We wanted to give advertisers and agencies the opportunity to deliver highly relevant ads in News Feed, the most engaging place on the web. Previously, advertisers could run standard ads on the right hand side of Facebook on the desktop. Starting today, advertisers can run Page post link ads on the right-hand side of Facebook and in News Feed on desktop. As they do today, these ads will point back to specific landing pages to help direct-response advertisers drive conversions,” said Facebook in a Studio blog post.
Note: these ads won’t appear in your mobile news feed.
It’s also important to note that this is not going to drastically increase the amount of ads you’ll see in the news feed, so you’re not going to get inundated with ads at a higher frequency – it’s just that some of these page post ads will be much better targeted based on your other activities.
Facebook says that it’s all about providing users with more relevant ads, which is synonymous with better ads:
“Allowing advertisers to reach people in News Feed is important because people spend more time in News Feed than any other part of Facebook. We also believe that ads delivered through FBX will create more relevant ads for people.”