Facebook announces plans to streamline social media ad offering

Facebook has announced plans to simplify its online and mobile ad offering over the next six months.

Central to the plans is a reduction in the number of ad types on offer from the social media giant.

The company hopes that eventually advertisers will be able to enter what they want to achieve with their ads and be pointed to the right type or combination of ads.

“In the next six months, we plan to streamline the number of ad units from 27 to fewer than half of that while mapping all of our ads to the business objectives marketers care about — be it in-store sales, online conversions, app installs, etc,” Facebook product manager Fidji Simo says.

“We noticed that many ad units accomplish the same goals, so we’re cutting out these redundancies. This includes removing the Questions product for Pages because marketers can simply ask a question in a post and get answers in comments.”

From next month, Facebook will remove online offer pages, claiming that advertisers find it more effective to link to a regular page post links.

The company also hopes to make its advertising look more consistent, and include features from sponsored stories in all its ads.

“Previously, to get the best social context available, advertisers had to purchase sponsored stories in addition to ads. In the future, for example, when you create a Page post photo ad, we will automatically add social context to boost performance and eliminate the extra step of creating sponsored stories,” Simo says.