April 15th, is tax day in the United States, but let’s stray away from worrying about what we had to pay in taxes last year. Instead, let’s reflect on the changes Facebook has made to its platform in the past year. Facebook is an effective channel for advertising and marketing, but keeping up with the platform changes while juggling other digital channels including email campaigns, mobile SMS messages, and your website can be hectic. That’s why we’ve summarized the past year of important additions and modifications.

Major Improvements:

Facebook Audience Network:

Last year at F8, Facebook’s Developer Conference, the Facebook Audience Network was announced. It went live on Oct 7, 2014, and enables you to place ads outside of Facebook in mobile apps via Facebook’s robust ecosystem. This year at F8, it was announced that the Facebook Audience Network will expand to reach a larger audience and leverage video by expanding its ecosystem across the LiveRail Ad Network.

Right Hand Side Ads:

Right Hand Side ads have been around since the beginning of Facebook advertising, but in June 2014 Facebook made these ads larger and more similar to Newsfeed ads. The change has produced a three times higher CTR for social.com clients using this ad format.

New Ad Formats:

Multi-product Ads:

In the last year, Facebook introduced new ad types that are now available for you to utilize in your campaigns. Multi Product Ads provide between two and 10 links to items on your website in order to drive more clicks and website traffic. Each link has its own name, description, and image. In early tests, when this format only allowed three links, Facebook saw click-through-rates (CTR) increase as much as 42% and its cost per acquisition decrease between 42% and 45% from one ecommerce partner.

Dynamic Product Ads:

Another ad type Facebook has rolled out are Dynamic Product Ads, which allow you to automatically target website and mobile app shoppers who are logged into Facebook with relevant product or multi-product ads.

Reach & Frequency:

You can now predictably buy large unique reach on Facebook, and control the ad frequency for your campaign with Facebook’s roll out of Reach and Frequency ads. This allows you to scale advertising in a similar way to how you might buy TV ads.

Emphasis on Quality Content:

The algorithm change to the newsfeed that began in January 2015 decreases the reach of organic page posts in an attempt to emphasize high quality content. Facebook encourages advertisers to avoid over-promotional posts and have eliminated fan gating, where users must “Like” a page in order to be eligible to enter a contest or giveaway. Video on Facebook is being more widely adopted by both users and marketers, and Facebook has taken over YouTube for number of videos being uploaded. The types of content that is important and relevant on Facebook is changing, but so is the device on which users are engaging with said content. Over 65% of Facebook video views occur on mobile and Facebook’s mobile ad revenue reached 66% of the company's total revenue in Q3 2014, up from 70% in the previous year. Needless to say, the Facebook platform and user trends continually change, so make sure you are staying informed to put your ad dollars to the best use!

Advertising Management:

Finally, after F8, Facebook made many low-level yet fundamental changes to how their advertising is bought and managed. Specifically, all gray users account types have been deprecated and the Business Manager was released. This allows you to manage ad accounts, pages, and user privileges all in one place. Targeting and ad placement for advertising campaigns have moved from the ad level, to the ad set level, which requires all ads in an ad set to target a single audience. This change will help advertisers optimize their campaigns based on information about how audiences are performing.  Finally, page post ads are now unpublished page posts and do not appear on your page. This gives you greater flexible to customize targeting and optimize creative, which creates for better performance of campaigns.