Facebook Ad Exchange (FBX) Opens For Business With 16 Partners

Sep 13, 2012 at 2:49pm ET by Pamela Parker

After a beta period lasting a couple of months, the doors are open on the new Facebook Ad Exchange (FBX), which makes the social networking giant’s inventory available to real-time bidding (RTB) and retargeting.

Facebook is working with the exchanges of a generous number of partners, including AdRoll, AppNexus, Brandscreen, Criteo, DataXu, MediaMath, Nanigans, Kenshoo, Optimal, RocketFuel, Tellapart, TheTradeDesk, Triggit, Turn, Xaxis, and X+1. The company says that through these partners, advertisers can access capabilities like multi-touch attribution, view-through conversions, global frequency capping, day-parting, and creative optimization. The most obvious application, though, is retargeting.

Given that Facebook controls 25% of the display ad inventory on the internet, according to comScore, the availability of FBX is expected to have a significant impact not just on Facebook, but on the overall advertising ecosystem.

“It is difficult to overstate the impact that Facebook Exchange will have on the entire digital media landscape,” said Brian Lesser, CEO of WPP Group’s Xaxis, in a press release. “With the launch of FBX, Facebook not only instantly multiplies the overall size of the RTB market, it provides high-quality inventory that is brand safe and extremely targeted.”

So far, partners are crowing about positive results in the beta period, touting FBX’s volume and the responsiveness of the audience when targeted using their additional data and technology. Nearly ever partner’s web site prominently features their FBX capabilities.

Needless to say, both partners and Facebook itself have everything to gain by promoting the offering, and partners put out press releases in sync to tout FBX. But does it really work? And for what objectives? Here are a few of the results being released by partners now that the exchange is up and running.

Xaxis says it’s worked with several Fortune 1000 advertisers and achieved positive results, citing specifically an unnamed quick-service restaurant (QSR) worked to drive new orders, lowering its cost-per-order by an average of 22% versus similar campaigns that didn’t use FBX inventory.
Turn didn’t release specific metrics, saying only that “advertisers have achieved their overall campaign goals very quickly,” attesting to the value of the Facebook inventory.
Triggit CEO Zach Coelius, in a blog post, said the company is able to find customers on FBX, achieving four times the return-on-investment at 1/5 of the cost-per-acquisition. And Coelius expects those metrics to stand up post-beta and into the “foreseeable future.”
MediaMath said that for one campaign FBX accounted for nearly 40% of the conversions driven within three weeks of launch, representing nearly four times the conversion rate of non-Facebook media.
The Trade Desk CEO Jeff Green said, “The results to date have been impressive – one retailer is sourcing conversions at half the CPA they find on other inventory sources.”

About The Author: Pamela Parker is executive features editor of Marketing Land and a contributing editor for Search Engine Land. She’s a well-respected authority on digital marketing, having reported and written on the subject since 1998, including a stint as managing editor of ClickZ. She’s also worked to help monetize independent publishers’ sites at Federated Media Publishing. She blogs about media and marketing at The River and about cooking, gardening and parenthood at Free Range. See more articles by Pamela Parker

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