Today at F8, Facebook discussed several key areas that matter for advertisers. First, it flexed its muscle and showed all of the ways that it has helped its partners grow their businesses. This focused on the Facebook vision of helping developers Build, Grow, and Monetize apps. 

There were a couple points of special interest to advertisers. Facebook introduced a new app analytics SDK; and integrations between LiveRail, Facebook Audience Network, and Facebook’s people-centric approach to ad targeting.

Mark kicked things off with a few big numbers: Last year, Facebook drove over 3.5 billion app installs, and people shared over 50 billion pieces of content from apps directly onto Facebook.  A full 80% of the top 100 apps use the Facebook login.  In total, Facebook has driven more than one billion paid app installs! 

Facebook has evolved from a single monolithic platform to a whole ecosystem of apps, each of which is massive in its own right – more than 700 million people use Groups, another 700M use Whatsapp, 600M use Messenger, and 300M use Instagram.  

Next, Facebook showed a new Facebook Analytics for Apps which is a free tool that helps you better understand your app’s audience, measure how people use your app, and track key events within the app.  This will be powerful for advertisers in two ways: first, with a better understanding of who your users are, you can hone your ad targeting to show ads only to the people more likely to be interested in your app. Second, by tracking in-app events, you can focus your measurement not just on app installs, but specific conversions within your app, such as a shopping cart checkout of in-app purchases, which drive real revenue. 

Finally, the biggest announcement was that LiveRail will be included in the Facebook Audience Network.

Last year, Facebook acquired LiveRail to provide a premier solution for video advertising across all of digital, and now, Salesforce Social.com advertisers can leverage the same people-based approach to advertising that is central to our shared vision, and directly advertise to customers across the LiveRail ad network. 

On top of this, with Salesforce Active Audiences, advertisers can programmatically bring their view of their customers into these advertising campaigns as well. Premium video advertising, bought across the web and mobile, using addressable 1^st party data is a game changer.   

Today, native ads are already half the Facebook Audience Network, and have an average CPM of 7x higher than banner ads. Facebook will combine the premium ad units of LiveRail with the people-based ad targeting of Facebook’s existing solutions.

As Facebook itself closed the presentation,

For more information about Salesforce Active Audiences and to see how it can improve your advertising, click here.