At TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco today, TechCrunch editor Erick Schonfeld took the stage to chat with Facebook’s Product Director for Ads at Facebook Gokul Rajaram about the social network’s advertising operations. For background, Rajaram was known as the “Godfather of Google Adsense,” and joined Facebook last year through the acquisition of his company Chai Labs.
Rajaram says that Facebook ads are based on the premise that people want to discover what people are doing, and provide a social discovery experience. For example, brand messages paired with social context (i.e. likes) leads to 68 percent ad recall (meaning people actually remember the ad). And these ads results in four-time higher of a likelihood for viewers to purchase the product advertised.
He explains that majority of page views have social ads or sponsored stories on them, and says that these social ad formats are the foundation of ads going forward for Facebook. As you may know, the social network recently launched sponsored stories, which turns status updates, Likes, checkins and application activity on Facebook into advertisement for a brands.
Schonfeld asked about a possibility of creating an AdSense for advertisers on Facebook. Rajaram says it’s something they are thinking about, but the network has no immediate plans for a similar product. Pricing of ads on Facebook is directly correlated with the value of the ad. This value, he says, can be determined by brand awareness impact, clicks and more.
Rajaram says there’s a misconception that social ads are silos. The best campaigns have an engagement component with loyal fans. In terms of targeting, he says that advertisers see significantly high performance when enabling in-depth targeting (unsurprisingly).
To help advertisers track conversions, Facebook is deeply integrating with third-party conversion tracking systems.