Facebook has growing revenue at stake both from marketers paying for more ads and prodding users to engage more to spend money within apps. When Facebook members sign into an app via the social-networking site, the company takes a 30% cut in payments revenue.
This year alone, Facebook has delivered more than 145 million downloads to Apple’s App Store and Google Play. Marketers for game developers have piled on to advertise their apps on Facebook because the social site’s 1.15 billion members make it the meeting place to find and message friends online for social games play.
“So many people spend a lot of their day on Facebook,” says Mike Maser, CEO and founder of fitness routines app Fitstar, which has tested Facebook’s mobile app ads.
The number of developers who have embraced Facebook’s in-News Feed ads has swelled from 3,000 in the first quarter to more than 8,400 by the end of the second quarter.
“We are finding great success in really growing the mobile app install business,” says Deb Liu, who oversees Facebook payments and mobile app ads at Facebook.
The social-networking giant has been building a business around adding features to help app developers grow their user bases and make more money. Facebook in April acquired app analytics firm Parse to bring its suite of tools to help app marketers run ad campaigns and reach audiences.
Facebook allows app marketers to target custom audiences based on data from the social site combined with offline data from app developers that could include email addresses, phone numbers and data culled online.
“The real magic here will be the high-fidelity targeting,” Maser says. Facebook has emerged “one of the dominant places for mobile publishers to get distribution — it’s bearing out in their stock price and user statistics.”
On Monday, Facebook announced its Graph Search feature will return search queries on people’s posts, status updates and comments. Results will only return information that members have shared with friends or have shared publicly. The features is slowly rolling out to a small group of users who already have Graph Search.
Shares of Facebook rose 0.4%, to $50.44, in trading Tuesday.
