A while ago apart from other windows, my FB page was open in one of the windows. As I came on the FB page, something interesting happened in the India-Pak match, and I got engrossed in it. Then during a dull moment, as my eyes returned to the FB page, something had changed. I found it weird, so I decided to observe it again.
I took this screenshot of my page…
And left it at that, working on Word in another window and also watching the India-Pak slog over. This FB page was in the background, not visible on the screen.
Sometime later I came back, and the page was displaying this…
Observe the ads on the right side. They have changed! Within under 5 mins. See the change in timing of the status updates.
Again as I focussed on the Yuvraj’s batting, the FB page was still on and untouched. A while later, it changed to this.
Is this a case of automatic impressions happening on Facebook. Look at the four ads of Jabong in the first pic. Jabong would have been charged for the impressions and now that the ads got changed automatically, it is safe to assume that no human saw those ads.
Automatic impressions? Useless expenses? What do you say?
Gourav Das
This looks perfectly fine. With more than tens of 1000s ads trying to compete for the 120px X 500px space, they have to ensure all ads get serviced.
Devgad Mango
Well, logical if you think from Facebook’s side, but as an advertiser, would you like your ads to get serviced on pages where no eyes are seeing them. You get charged for impressions.
Devgad Mango
Ok. Also checked up costs, so I guess for Rs 3 and Rs10 kind of CPM, such wasted impressions may not hurt much any way!
Nishant Agrawal
An interesting observation. Compare this with the Google search result ads. I don’t think they change. This can make a huge difference.
Gourav Das
Yes Google ads are mostly static but it does change in Gmail, though not in Youtube and there’s a technical reason to it as well. For everyone’s benefit I will attempt to explain it.
Gmail and most of Facebook is implemented as a Single Page app. No page reloads and all dynamic content being loaded at real time when users browse through links. In that case, when you browse through different links, content is loaded dynamically but the page (lets call it master page) remains same.The ads are displayed in the master page. Though users browse through different links within the app, they are eventually watching the same masterpage with different content loading in a div/section within the masterpage. People spend lot of time on Gmail/Facebook which translates to lot of time spent on a single master page. So it is essential to change ads on the master page.
But for example with Google search results page, people hardly spend a minute on the search results page, so it does not make sense to change ads. With Youtube too, each video is a loaded into a new page and average video length being <3 minute, again it does not make sense to change ads, because the assumption is that an average a person would not spend more than 4.5 minutes on a video page.