Source:exchange4media.com | View Online Article

Facebook’s recent aggressive stance towards revamping its ad capabilities continues as the company announced on Thursday that it is doing limited tests of a system that will allow Facebook ads to be delivered to third party apps. In a blog post, Facebook employee Sriram Krishnan said, “We are running a small test to explore showing Facebook ads in third-party mobile apps. In this test, we’ll be extending Facebook’s rich targeting to improve the relevancy of the ads people see, provide even greater reach for Facebook advertisers, and help developers better monetize their apps.” Facebook has hinted at its ambitions of running an ad network that delivers ads to third party applications for quite some time. In fact, the company has been involved in similar tests earlier, too, though none ever culminated into anything concrete. However, given Facebook’s renewed determination to project itself as a viable advertising platform for brands and advertisers, there might be more developments this time around. This does not bode well for Google, for long the dominant ad network on the internet. With Facebook known for its targeting capability and the high degree of accuracy of its demographic data, advertisers will be watching this news with considerable interest. Speaking to exchange4media, Madan Sanglikar, CEO, ad2c commented, “Facebook has been slow on the mobile front, but it has really improved in recent months. Also, native advertising is something that Facebook does really well, much better than Google. If they can take this to the next level, that is, to external networks, along with their strength in user profiling, it will be a big game changer.” These are still early days and Facebook has not released much information about the nature of these tests. Watch this space for further developments.