Lately, if you have been employing the search bar feature in Facebook, you might have discovered some discreetly placed sponsored search results — Facebook lingo for advertisements — popping up. The social media giant has been testing the feature for about a month now, but today the creative ads will reach a wider audience, according to a Facebook spokesperson.
Now, according to TechCrunch, Facebook is telling marketers to commence by making Sponsored Results available through the Power Editor tool. Sponsored Results are also officially a part of the Ads API. Officially, Sponsored Results give “advertisers the ability to embed ads to the list of tyeahead results.”
To begin with, Sponsored Results are the latest advertising attraction from Facebook. This means if a user searches for an app or page using the Facebook search bar, the search results could include sponsored ads from companies. Those ads link back to their company Facebook pages.
More from Facebook:
Advertisers can create standard on-site ads (with a 70 character message) that lead to Facebook pages or apps (including custom tabs on their page). Ads can be targeted against Facebook entities, including Pages, Places, Apps, and subscribe-enabled users. Facebook users see the ad when the targeted entity appears in their search results. Ads only show in desktop search results, not on mobile and not on the “more results” page.
Apparently, Facebook commenced experimenting the placements last week with a handful of advertisers, such as Zynga, EA, Disney, and Match.com are some of the big name developers that are already flooding your search bar with Sponsored Results. But beginning today the social media giant made the new sponsored unit available to all advertisers; they can now purchase the Sponsored Results in the Power Editor tool or API.
“We have launched a feature that displays sponsored results along with the organic results when people are looking for things on Facebook. We try to show people apps and pages as well that they will be most interested in,” a spokesperson informed VentureBeat.
Additionally, the Sponsored Results smoothly works like any other ad on Facebook, meaning you can click the “x” on the upper right-hand corner to do away with them. And just like with the rest of them, Facebook will ask you exactly what displeased you about said advert.
Moreover, the social networking giant is under intense pressure to make more money from advertising now that it is a public company.
Regardless of the falling, this new feature is similar to how Google injects sponsored ads into its search results, the payoff probably would not be as big for advertisers on Facebook since users are not typically searching for things they want to buy. Plus, companies would not be able to insert links that will take customers outside of Facebook.
Anyways, the new feature could increase brand awareness, something Facebook representative added that the company is still collecting feedback from users to determine the best user experience for Sponsored Results.