How Publishers can Make Money from Facebook’s Audience Network

Good news for publisher! Over the years we have seen a decrease in AdSense page RPM specially for Asian publishers as the number of mobile users grew faster and ads had a tough time performing well on mobile screens. This opened the opportunity for Facebook to target the mobile audience and with its 3 Million advertisers, Facebook is all set to march on a battle with AdSense in the mobile ecosystem.  The Audience Network started with mobile app and now has expand to Mobile Web, allowing publishers with good mobile inventory leverage this opportunity.

hat is Audience Network?

The Audience Network is a collection of mobile apps (and now mobile web) where Facebook advertisers can serve ads using the same targeting and measurement tools that they use on Facebook. Essentially, running ads in the Audience Network extends an advertiser’s reach beyond Facebook and into mobile apps. Audience Network ads come in both native and display format for photos and videos, and advertisers can enable their Facebook ads to run on the Audience Network by checking “Audience Network” in the placement section when they create or edit an ad.

With Facbeook’s Audience Network, you can see strong CPM’s if majority of your site’s traffic is mobile and from tier one countries. Even the performance is good for Asian and global traffic and you can get eCPMs as high as $1-$5. I suggest you try Audience Network ins association with other ad networks.

In this tutorial we will tell our publisher friends, how to get started with Audience Network and start monetizing your traffic in addition to AdSense.

Step-wise Guide to Get Started with Facebook’s Audience Network

Step 1: In order to get started with Facebook’s Audience Network for monetizing your Mobile Web traffic click on the link here. In this post we will only discuss the implementation of ad tags for Mobile traffic. Once you have opened the page, click on Start Now

Step 2: A new page will open up under Facebook for Developers section where you will see a Start Nowbutton along with the text- Monetize your mobile property with Facebook ads. Lets get started by Click on the Start Now button.

Step 3: Once you click on the start now button, you will be asked to link your mobile app or mobile website to Facebook app. If you’ve already linked your app, then you can choose the Facebook app linked to your website from the drop-down. Alternately, you can create a new Facebook app by clicking on the Create Facebook App button and step-wise following the guidelines provided by Facebook. It’s easy to link a website with your Facebook app. Once done, select the app and click on the Continue button.

Step 4: As you can see for creating this tutorial, I selected a new app which is linked to my website Myeduz.in.

Step 5: Upon clicking the Continue button, you will be taken to the Quick Start for Audience Network page. To get started with placement creation, you need to Add a domain.

Step 6: Add your domain name and click on the Save button.

Step 7: Once you have added the domain. Next you need to click on Create Ad Placement button which is just a little below add a domain section. A placement will let you select what type of add you want and the refresh rate for the ad.

Step 8: You will be prompted to Create a Placement. You may name your placement as Website_placement_location. You may leave the second field as blank. However, you have to select the display format. If you’re implementing the ad tag on mobile web I suggest you select the display format as Banner.

Step 9:  Make sure mediation is disabled. Select the refresh interval to be 60 seconds. This means that the ads will auto refresh after every 60 seconds. Also it is essential to optimize your ads. If you optimize for CPM, your fill rate will be low and if you want to increase the fill rate, CPM will go down. I’d suggest you balance the CPM and fill rate and keep the slider unaltered. Click on Save to continue.

tep 10: Once the placement is created, the ad tag is generated. The Get Code tab will generate the script for Mobile app and the Get HTML tab will generate the script for the Mobile website. Click on the get html tab and a pop-up will appear with the code. There are two options to integrate the ad tag on your site. One is direct injecting the code on your site and the other is using DFP. If you’re using DFP you need to add the DFP passback code. Also you need to select the banner size. There are two available options. 1. 300×250 and 2. 320×50.

Also you can choose native ads. I would suggest you to choose the 300×250 banner ad. You need to copy this ad code and paste it on your website at a location where you want the ad to appear. Since the ad is visible to only mobile viewers, makesure you tweak the code accordingly. If you dont have much idea about the coding, I suggest you to use an ad placement plugin called Advanced ads. This plugin has the option to specifically show ads to mobile visitors.

Step 11: Once you are done with the code integration the website review process automatically begins. Under the Alerts section you will see a notification stating that Your Audience Network Domain is Being Reviewed and we will contact you once the review is complete. Normally, depending upon the timezone, the review would take 10-30 mins. My site got approved in about 10 minutes. Once approved, you will get a notification. Head to the performance tab after sometime to check the reports.

Step 12: Here I am sharing my performance report. As you can see there are a few columns. I guess these 4 columns need a mention.

Request- The number of times Facebook received an ad request

Filled- The number of times Facebook returned an ad for the request

Impressions- The number of times a visitor actually saw the ad

eCPM- Revenue per 1000 ad impressions.

As you know, all ad networks require sometime to understand the traffic quality and traffic type before it’s algorithm can learn about the users and target appropriate ads. So you need to give it at least 7-10 days of time for the eCPM to optimize. During these days you can see a fluctuation in the eCPM. As you can see the fill rate is less but the eCPM is high.

Upon taking a closer look on the demographics, I found that US (eCPM of $9.62) and UK (eCPM of $4.65) traffic is doing exceptionally great. This provides a scope for better understanding of the conversions and the targeting.

Following this step, you need to update your payment settings otherwise Facebook will stop running ads as soon as your account reaches $100. You need to have a social security number/tax number along with the bank account details (including SWIFT code) so that Facebook can directly deposit the money to your account. Let me know if you have any difficulty in setting the payment info.

A Few Things Worth Discussing

As you can see my fill rate is very low. Under such circumstances, we should use Facebook ad tags with DFP with AdSense as a passback. In my next article I will cover how to implement Facebook ads through DFP.

Also there is a substantial variation in the number of ads delivered and the no of ads viewed. Since Facebook pays only for the number of ads viewed, the ad tag should be placed as high as possible. This will ensure less difference between filled and impressions and let you earn more.

I suggest you try not more than 2 Facebook ads on your website and let me know how it performs for you. Hoping this article has been helpful to get you started with Facebook’s audience network. If you’re looking for other AdSense alternatives, I suggest you read this and also this. If you’re looking to optimize your ad placement for increased AdSense revenue, I would suggest you to read this article.

Do you have Questions/Queries?

I guess you might have quite a lot of questions like what will be your eCPM be like, how much revenue share does Facebook take. You can take a look at this video which tries to answer quite a few questions. For all additional info, I suggest you go through the help section of Audience Network here.

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