Inside Facebook
Inside Facebook |
- Facebook for iPhone Now Pulls the News Feed From m.facebook.com
- Ads API Profile: Spruce Media Full-Service Managed Spend for Performance Advertisers
- Facebook Hires and Departures: Google’s Creative Director, Quora, and More
- Facebook Careers Posts: Commercial Transactions, Mobile, Sales, Austin and More
| Facebook for iPhone Now Pulls the News Feed From m.facebook.com Posted: 14 Apr 2011 04:34 PM PDT Earlier this month, Facebook released an update for the Facebook for iPhone mobile app that included an “Improved news feed”, but no one seemed to understand what had actually changed. We’ve determined that the native app now pulls the news feed directly from mobile site m.facebook.com. This allows Facebook’s engineers to subtly push news feed design and backend changes to the iPhone without a software update, and lets them maintain one set of code instead of two.
Previously, the Facebook for iPhone app pulled the news feed directly from Facebook private native app APIs. Now the only discernible difference between the news feeds on Facebook for iPhone and m.facebook.com is that the Like and comment buttons rendered by the iPhone app when users hit the ‘+’ button to leave feedback on a story are a little slicker looking. The update will allow Facebook’s mobile team to spend less time rewriting similar code, and more time improving the user experience and porting features from the Facebook canvas site. The update that arrived last week was the first one in five months on iOS. Facebook said it was trying to achieve parity between Facebook for iPhone and Facebook for Android, but recently the mobile site has been the first to get new features such as Event checkins. The link between the iPhone app and mobile site’s news feeds could keep Apple’s native Facebook app a small step ahead of Android’s in terms of functionality. While few users may have noticed the change when the Facebook for iPhone software update was released, the change means their feature and bug fix requests may be addressed sooner. |
| Ads API Profile: Spruce Media Full-Service Managed Spend for Performance Advertisers Posted: 14 Apr 2011 02:32 PM PDT
Spruce Media aims to attain the lowest possible costs per action ads for its clients. Founder and chief executive Rob Jewell tells us that he sees full managed spend as the best option for Facebook advertisers as most don’t understand or have the technology to handle the relatively new and complex channel. For reference, the Facebook Ads API allows developers to create powerful tools and services for designing, targeting, and managing Facebook ads. These are especially important for big advertisers who need better efficiency and A/B testing than what’s available through Facebook's self-serve performance advertising system. Company ProfileSpruce Media launched its service in April 2010 after Jewell sold off his previous company, SocialCash, an ad network for in-Facebook app advertising. The San Francisco and Washington, D.C.-based company now has 18 employees, and handles millions of dollars in spend every month. In Q1 2011, it delivered over 50 billion impressions on a CPA, CPI, and CPL basis for more than 15 clients including LivingSocial, Bigpoint, LOLapps, 6waves, and Toms. It is now one of the world’s largest Ads API companies, and operates in the same space as performance-basis services AdParlor and Nanigans, though it isn’t solely focused on social games. Spruce Media is centered on its media buying team. Jewell tells us “There are hundreds of creative approaches and optimization strategies to solving the media buying problem. No machine will ever be able to do it nor will a single media buyer." It therefore assigns five buyers to a client at a time, bringing in a wealth of ad creative and targeting approaches in order to lower CPAs. Once the original team has exhausted their strategies, Spruce switches in another set of buyers.
The company is taking a progressive approach to Facebook’s new ad unit Sponsored Stories. It works with clients to improve the user registration flows on their websites to increase connections to a client’s Facebook Connect app, seeding Sponsored Stories. Jewell tells us he sees social ad units like Sponsored Stories as the future of Facebook advertising. As such, tools and services focused on search advertising will find it harder and harder to bolt on the Facebook Ads API, and they won’t be able to adapt to Facebook’s rapid release schedule fast enough. Therefore, he believes its crucial for advertisers to work with companies that specialize in Facebook ads. Service InfoSpruce Media clients set goals for ROI and scale and Spruce accepts the contract if it’s confident it can achieve them. Using its internally developed tool, the company’s media buyers A/B test ad creative and targeting variants, which are managed through a two-screen dashboard. Multiple identical instances of an ad are rolled into the same line item to ensure variants receive a sufficient number of impressions to draw reliable conclusions. Budget is shifted to high performing combinations using revenue per click and percentage bidding options. Dayparting allows for enhanced optimization, and sparkline and pop-down graphs based on hourly reporting convey performance to buyers at a glance. Some other tools don’t offer these inline charts, requiring users to click through each ad to get an idea of its historical performance.
Facebook and Search Advertising Don’t MixRob Jewell tells us that once the Facebook ad space matures, there might be a market for licensable tools. Until then, though, a performance advertiser’s best bet is to trust their spend to a CPA-based full managed service. He says this works out better than going with an agency-style service who charges a percentage of spend, such as TBG Digital, because those companies aren’t as incentivized to find the lowest possible CPAs for their clients, but instead to just get clients to increase spend. When we asked Jewell about what the next generation of Ads API features would be, he explained that many tools and services actually still have problems with the basics. For instance, they’re basing their optimizations on single runs of ads variants that might only get 1000 impressions — not enough to conclude if they’re high performers or not. He also told us many tools don’t know to clone and republish successful ads once they start to dip in performance because due to some intricacy of the API, this actually jumpstarts their performance. Once the basics are covered, he thinks Ads API companies need to focus on conveying the power of the new Facebook ad units and teaching them how change their websites and Facebook Pages to harness the value of units such as Sponsored Stories. Clients need tools and services that are adapting to the shift towards social ads, and that means choosing a service like Spruce Media, not a company anchored to search advertising. |
| Facebook Hires and Departures: Google’s Creative Director, Quora, and More Posted: 14 Apr 2011 11:00 AM PDT
But most prominently, Google creative director Ji Lee has officially confirmed on his web site that he has moved over to take the same title at Facebook (he’d mentioned the move during a talk a couple weeks ago, but hadn’t said much beyond that). Facebook has never had a creative director before, so we’re checking with the company to get a better sense of what Lee will be working on. You can see some of his previous work here and here. New hires per LinkedIn and Other Sources:
Recent departures, per LinkedIn and Other Sources:
Prior listings now removed from the Facebook Careers Page:
Who else is hiring? The Inside Network Job Board presents a survey of current openings at leading companies in the industry. |
| Facebook Careers Posts: Commercial Transactions, Mobile, Sales, Austin and More Posted: 14 Apr 2011 07:51 AM PDT
The company was also hiring Head of Creative Agencies in Chicago and New York; this position coordinates creative across departments within Facebook. In other hires in the New York, Dublin, Austin, Singapore and Sao Paulo offices Facebook seems to be hiring in several departments, including sales, engineering and much more. Posts added this week on Facebook's Careers Page:
Jobs posted by Facebook on LinkedIn:
Who else is hiring? The Inside Network Job Board presents a survey of current openings at leading companies in the industry. |
As part of our ongoing series on companies offering Facebook's Ads API tools and services, today we profile 
Facebook hired some analysts and interns this week, lost a few recruiters and is in search of software engineers, according to the company’s 
Illustrating Facebook’s increasing focus on monetization, the company’s Careers job listings page now includes two positions for | You are subscribed to email updates from Inside Facebook To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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