Facebook Marketplace Gets Buy-In From Brands and Users Alike
With additional features and placements being rolled out each month, Facebook continues to enable innovative ways for users and brands to interact with others on the platform. Recently, Facebook rolled out a new feature called Marketplace, where users can connect with others who are interested in buying and selling items through the platform. Much like an exchange place, the Facebook Marketplace has been able to facilitate over 18 million new items posted for sale in just one month, with 77% growth in the amount of unique conversations between potential buyers and sellers.
Key Differentiators of Marketplace
A key factor that sets Marketplace apart from other exchange platforms is that competing sites do not disclose nearly as much information about who is on the other end of an exchange. With Marketplace, each item is associated with a Facebook user’s profile and the vicinity they’re located in to help gauge travel coordination and buying and selling logistics, which provides users with a greater sense of comfort and confidence in completing a purchase or sale. The product allows billions of users the opportunity to buy and sell items while saving time and money to focus on every day activities they enjoy.
Advertising Opportunities in Marketplace
Building on the success of Marketplace, Facebook has found a way to seamlessly weave valuable advertising units into a space where users are already showing strong purchase intent signals. This advertising opportunity allows brands to intercept a key part of the consideration and conversion phases of a user’s purchase journey by giving advertisers a chance to deliver products similar to what users have searched for. Brands can also target Marketplace users based on their interests and past purchase behavior. As a result, users have been able to find products in a separate section of the platform, distinct from updates from friends and family.
Benefits for Advertisers and Users
Being able to capture revenue without leaving the platform benefits the advertiser, the platform, and the user. Brands are able to insert themselves into a key phase in the user purchase funnel, while Facebook is able to unobtrusively show users items similar to what they are searching for. And users get the benefit of being served purchasable items they have expressed interest in without having to do any additional digging. In a competitive landscape, Facebook has been able to add search-based marketing to their repertoire where they’ve previously been able to master social media advertising. This means that brands are now able to bid on search-based ad inventory within the Facebook ecosystem while leveraging the platform’s suite of targeting capabilities and data partnerships.
Granular User Data Integration
A key reason the Marketplace ad placements are already becoming such valuable space for advertisers is that search has never been so granularly tied to a user ID. With first party and/or pixel-based information, Facebook can derive invaluable information about its users to better execute against. Where other traditional search marketing formats use cookie data and tagging to trace back user information, Facebook’s account creation alone brings useful data points that can ensure brands are reaching those who are most inclined to take action and purchase Marketplace placement products advertised. What may be the most important element of this extension is that advertisers are able to simply utilize the same ads within the News Feed and add Marketplace as an additional placement to optimize towards. This means that brands can allocate their dollars in the most efficient way throughout the purchase journey without needing to force spend towards a placement that isn’t driving the strongest return.
