Facebook 2012 Annual Report Download - page 12

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Please find page 12 of the 2012 Facebook annual report below. You can navigate through the pages in the report by either clicking on the pages listed below, or by using the keyword search tool below to find specific information within the annual report.

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•Social Context. We believe that the recommendations of friends have a powerful influence on
consumer interest and purchase decisions. We offer marketers the ability to include “social context”
with their marketing messages. Social context is information that highlights a friend’s connections with
a particular brand or business.
•Engagement. We believe that the shift to a more social web creates new opportunities for businesses to
engage with interested customers. Many of our ad products offer new and innovative ways for our
marketers to interact with our users, such as ads that encourage comments, include polls, invite people
to an event or help users discover and install mobile applications.
Any brand or business can have a presence on Facebook by creating a Facebook Page. Through Pages,
we give brands the opportunity to form direct and ongoing relationships with their existing and
prospective customers, with the potential to turn them into valuable advocates. When a Facebook user
“Likes” a Page, the Page owner has the opportunity to publish stories to the person’s News Feed on an
ongoing basis. We believe that this ongoing connection provides businesses with a significant
advantage as compared to advertising on traditional websites. In addition, businesses can use Pages to
drive awareness, traffic to their e-commerce websites or physical stores, sales, and ultimately customer
loyalty. We do not charge businesses for their Pages, nor do we charge for the resulting organic
distribution of their content. However, Page owners can use Facebook ads to reach a larger audience or
utilize our Promoted Posts feature, which enables businesses to pay a fixed fee to boost the distribution
of posts that they care about to people who have “Liked” the Page, to gain more prominent distribution.
Facebook offers products and tools that enable marketers to leverage our unique combination of reach,
relevance, social context, and engagement.
•Facebook Ads. Our ads, including sponsored stories, offer businesses the opportunity to direct a user to
specific content, a destination web page or a Facebook Page if the user clicks on the ad. Our ads
provide our users with a consistent ad experience and enable marketers to deploy and adjust campaigns
rapidly.
Currently, ads can appear in multiple locations including in the right-hand side of most page types on
personal computers, and in the News Feed on personal computers and mobile devices. Ads with social
context allow marketers to highlight the interactions of a user’s friends with a brand or product, such as
Liking or Commenting on the marketer’s Facebook Page. Ads with social context respect users’
privacy settings and may be shown only to the people users have already shared their activity with on
Facebook.
•Facebook Ad System. When marketers create an ad campaign on Facebook, they specify the types of
users they want to reach based on information that users chose to share. In addition, marketers can use
other products such as FBX and Custom Audiences to more precisely target their desired audience.
Marketers indicate the maximum price they are willing to pay for their ad, per click (CPC) or per
thousand impressions (CPM), and their maximum budget. Our system also supports guaranteed
delivery of a fixed number of ad impressions for a fixed price. Facebook’s ad serving technology
dynamically determines the best available ad to show each person based on the combination of the
person’s unique attributes and the real-time comparison of bids from eligible ads.
•Ad Analytics and Facebook Insights. Marketers can use our analytics platform to track and optimize
the performance of their campaigns. Facebook Ad Analytics enable marketers to gain insights into
which ads were displayed and clicked on. These analytics help marketers make modifications to their
ad campaigns to maximize results.
For marketers with Facebook Pages, Facebook Insights provides timely information about the
performance of their Page and related posts. The data include the number of users who Liked and
Commented on the Page and a metric, “People Talking About This,” which shows how many stories
about the marketer’s brand are being created and shared, among other aggregated and anonymized
engagement data.
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