Over the past year, we have been gathering feedback from marketers about our ads products. One point we heard loud and clear is that we need to simplify our product offering. As the services we provide to marketers have grown, so have our new products; while each product may be good on its own, we realized that many of them accomplish the same goals

Facebook is known more for it 'social' aspect rather than the business angle. However this is fast changing as Facebook is becoming a detrimental business tool for  conducting online business.

Keeping in line the eCommerce business operations, the social networking giant, announced on Thursday that it will be simplifying its ad marketing options for marketers.

Facebook's latest updates have not moved away much from its primary setup. However, with the class of consumers increasingly accessing Facebook through mobile, a new set of ad updates for users with small screen mobile devices is being ushered.

In a nutshell, the marketers will be still be allowed to showcase their ads on the product pages but the options list has been squeezed considerably. The ads will now find a place in the user's newsfeeds on the right hand corner of the webpage.

The official statement on its news room states that, with the updates, marketers will no longer be asked to choose from the current 27 ad units. Instead the list has been reduced to 6 or 7 categories based on specific aims like driving traffic and generating "likes" for the product's page. The sponsored stories will now be engineered for this cause. "In the future, for example, when you create a Page post photo ad, we will automatically add social context to boost performance and eliminate the extra step of creating sponsored stories. We know social enhances ad resonance; people are influenced by this type of word-of-mouth marketing".

"Offers" has been a pretty confusing category until now. The dilemma has been sorted out as "Offer" ads talking of discounts on products and links for coupons, will be listed as a general ad unit for all merchants from now on. Those with offline stores, looking to promote online, will still have seperate "offers" ad units, however. The sources state that redundancy was seen as a major cause for the move. For example, the "Question" feature has been eliminated as the marketers can easily clarify their doubts by simply posting it on the Product page

a. To act as a bridging tool of communication between the seller and buyers."Our vision is that over time, an advertiser can come to Facebook and tell us what they are trying to achieve, and our ads tools will automatically suggest the right combination of products to help them achieve it." 

b. 80% of Facebook's revenue is derived from advertising. As the year's statistics suggest, Facebook's shares have fallen about 15% so far and it seriously needs a booster right now.

We hope to see how the eCommerce circles react and adapt to these new changes. Do let us know your thoughts on this latest update by leaving a comment below.

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