According to Bloomberg, customers of Facebook online ad system has increased by 300% as compared to last year. This has clearly shown that more businesses especially the small and medium ones are heading to social networking websites to advertise their products instead of using the traditional way of spreading the word of mouth through newspapers and magazines. Tim Kendall, the Facebook’s director of product marketing for monetization said that “You basically just have a greater diversity of people using our ad system — lots of businesses, lots of local businesses finding success.” “It’s really been a steady, successful growth pattern.” He declined to provide specific revenue data.
Just like Google’s CPC (Cost Per Click) advertisements displayed on the right and top placings of the search results, Facebook’s automated advertisements which comes in text and photos, targets users based on the information they put on their profiles. Unveiled in 2007, the automated ad system enables customers to advertise either they webpages or even a Facebook Page, Application, Group or Event. For image ads, the world’s most popular social networking platform only allows a 110px wide by 80px box for the image and a maximum of 25 words for the title.
Despite the global economic downturn, its customers’ base has boosted to more triple on a year-to-year basis edging past the search engine giant Google in terms of advertisement revenue growth. In April, Google reported its first sequential drop in quarterly sales since it went public in 2004.
On the other hand, quite a number of advertisers have planned to back out of the advertising system due to the recent Facebook Click Fraud which has enraged them. The advertisers are complaining about click fraud of up to 100% for weeks, and the situation doesn’t seem to be getting any better. If the folks at Facebook aren’t going to resolve this crucial issue as soon as possible, I’m pretty sure more potential advertisers who have contributed million of dollars to Facebook’s bank account will quit the automated advertisement system and look for other ways to advertise on the web.