Facebook begins offering bandwidth targeting to advertisers
Facebook's business division announced in a blog post Wednesday that it has turned on a new bandwidth-targeting feature that makes it easier for businesses to target advertisements to users based on their mobile network types.
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The social network already offered advertisers the option to target ads based on device type, model and operating system, but says advertisers looking to reach more users outside of the US have lobbied for the bandwidth segmentation ability.
"People in high-growth countries around the world are coming online at a staggering rate, and a majority are accessing the internet via mobile networks," wrote Brendan Sullivan, a product marketing manager at Facebook, in a blog post. "In these countries, a mobile phone is much more than a way to place calls and send messages."
Sullivan posited that targeting by mobile network type makes it easier for advertisers to choose what type of content to send to users in order to optimize its reach.
So with bandwidth targeting, Sullivan said video campaigns can now be sent to people with high-speed connections, while an image or link ad can be targeted to people with slower connections.
But of course, Facebook's focus on helping advertisers is hardly altruistic. The social network relies heavily on ad revenue, and to keep up with its rapid expansion in non-US markets, it needed to make it easier and more tempting for advertisers to spend money.
And while the targeting could easily become common practice in the US, Sullivan said the feature is more for developing regions where it's locked in on its growth potential.
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