A New Metric To Optimize Your Audience Network Performance

We believe that what provides great ads experiences for people drives better results for businesses. Over the past three years, Facebook has built our advertising systems to deliver real business results for marketers and over the last year and a half, we have extended that capability through the Audience Network. By helping our over 2.5 million advertisers connect with people who are discovering their products and services, we're able to drive value for the overall ecosystem: more relevant ads for people, real business results for advertisers, and better yield and experiences for publishers and the people who use their apps. Furthermore, as the Facebook ads system delivers ads to real people and optimizes for advertiser outcomes, it creates an environment where fraud is more difficult to exist.

Historically, ad networks have rewarded clicks and CTR as the primary metrics publishers should care about. Our system is different - we pay publishers based on the outcomes they create for advertisers. We have heard from publishers that they want to know how best to optimize in our system, and we are committed to giving our partners actionable insights so that they can grow their businesses.

That's why today we're introducing Advertiser Outcome Score (AOS) for Audience Network, a measurement system that evaluates publisher's ad placements by their ability to drive outcomes for advertisers, such as app installs, purchases, or registrations. By providing more transparency into how placements are performing, publishers can better optimize their ads business, improving performance and helping maximize ad revenue.

How Advertiser Outcome Score Works

Advertiser Outcome Score can be viewed by publishers in the Audience Network dashboard and helps them easily identify opportunities for optimization. The score for each placement is based on a scale where one is the floor and there is no upward limit because as publishers optimize their placements, there is no cap on how well an individual placement can perform. We consider a strong score to be eight or above. Placement performance is evaluated frequently and as a score improves, CPMs also increase, which can lead to higher revenue for each ad served.

Optimizing with the Right Format

Every app is unique and through testing with different placements and formats, publishers can find what works best for their app. We've seen that native ads, which today represent over 80% of impressions in the Audience Network, continue to deliver strong results for publishers and advertisers.

For example, global Android developer Cheetah Mobile’s app-lock placement featured a native ad that mimicked a standard banner placement at the bottom of the app's page. To improve performance and help boost their score, they implemented a native horizontal scroll unit that utilizes rich images, resulting in a 150% increase in conversions and 200% increase in eCPMs.

AOS is available now for publishers to view in the Audience Network dashboard. To learn more about how to optimize your placements and see examples of high-scoring placements, take a look at our best practices guide.

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