Fine-tuning: Facebook makes Pages, Events ads more interactive

June 2, 2009 | Eric Eldon | Comments |

While Facebook has already displayed self-service advertising on events and public profile pages, now those ads are getting more interactive. You’ll be able to become a fan of an advertised public profile page by clicking on the “Become a fan” button without leaving whatever Event or Page. Same with RSVPing for advertised events. If you take one of these actions, like most other activity on Facebook, an item about it will appear for your friends to see.

This is how ads already work on users’ homepages, and it’s similar to how you can take actions on other parts of Facebook without leaving those page, such as becoming a friend with somebody while on their personal profile page.

Facebook doesn’t want people to have to click through to new pages if they don’t want to — even though more pageviews generate more banner ad impressions. Instead, the social network is trying to figure out how to make ads more meaningful to people within an easy-to-use interface. More on the announcement, here.

Today’s news isn’t a big new innovation, but rather an illustration of how the company is trying to fine-tune the advertising experience — something that seems to be working, judging by the company’s self-reported revenue growth.

Next Story: Justice Dept. investigates possible hiring pact between Google, Apple, Yahoo, others
Previous Story: Report: Private equity funds sitting on $400B of uninvested capital

Bookmark and Share

Tags:

Photo of Eric Eldon

About the Author, Eric Eldon

Eric currently covers digital media technology and business news, especially what's happening on social networks and their platforms. He also writes and edits stories about venture capital, and lots of other stuff, too. He started at VentureBeat in the spring of 2007, half a year or so after Matt Marshall left his reporting job at the San Jose Mercury News to found the site. Eric previously cofounded a startup called Writewith, that was building editorial software for newspapers and other groups of writers. The startup didn't work out, but he learned a lot.

  • I don't mean to be a troll, but this seems to have very pro-Facebook spin to it.

    As an advertiser, I can imagine this artificially inflating ROI (more fans) while reducing the actual return (views of the message on a fan page). I guess that it depends how important you view the stream, since advertisers will get entry into that no matter how a user becomes a fan.

    Just one opinion that all these little tweaks Facebook does aren't entirely altruistic or helpful.
  • Phil, everything you say is valid, except for the part about the "pro-Facebook spin" -- I'm not trying to be pro-Facebook. Overall, these changes seem like a good idea to me because they mean less clicking around. In the past, some social network advertising has been focused on making people click around more to create more impressions. As you said, I think the stream is important, much more important than getting an initial click to a fan page.
  • Why should a Facebook member be happy about an ad system that they bring value to and receive noting in return ?

    Facebook is a web 2.0 share cropping silo. Members add content; members clicks ads, members add value. Facebook locks in the content, generate revene from the ads, and hordes millions in revenue that they should be sharing with the community,
  • Great content as usual. Keep it up! Thanks again.
  • This is very nice!

    If they fan'ed my page, they get updates from me. A one-click opt-in. This is huge!

    Heck, I'll allocate some money to FB ads now.