Declan Kennedy, StitcherAds, CEO, a Facebook Marketing Partner recounts his experiences as one of the first Facebook Marketing Partners to integrate Facebook Product Ads.

The announcement last week from Facebook on its new Product Ads has certainly added fuel to the proverbial fire that is raging between media commentators on who will dominate the future of online retail advertising: Facebook or Google. The fact is, given the scale of Facebook’s user base, and its growing dominance of both mobile display and desktop display inventory, its inevitable that it will start to take considerable market share from Google.

Obviously, within the ecommerce vertical, Google’s Product Listing Ads have proven to be a big hit, but the ecommerce market is growing, and so are the expectations of ecommerce
marketers. The shift to product-level ads is a winner and Facebook has a PLA beater in its
freshly launched Facebook Product Ads.

Online retail is booming – annually it’s already at $1.5 trillion globally, and it’s projected to increase even faster in coming years, according to Morgan Stanley. With this growth, ecommerce marketers are actively searching for tools that will enable them to scale to the capture of demand in real-time, ideally through automation.

Facebook adoption and usage is rising in tandem to this requirement. With its 1.4 billion user base, Facebook has an identity layer that is unparalleled in the programmatic display market.

This means that Facebook can reach consumers wherever they are on whatever device they
are using. This targeted reach, at scale, results in true people-based, cross-device
capabilities — influencing the path to purchase from mobile newsfeed, through to tablet and desktop.

Facebook adoption as a direct response marketing machine is at an inflection point, where it is now a must-have paid channel for savvy online retailers. Key to this is cross-device tracking and cross-device attribution.

If a retailer is still stuck on last click, then connecting the dots between mobile ads driving desktop conversions cannot be made. On-boarding is also minimal, with automation being driven by use of product catalogues to automate creative with intent signals coming from pixels and mobile app SDKs.

With these benefits in mind, it’s clear that it offers a number of advantages over the much heralded Google Shopping Ads, but exactly how much market share it will take it still up for debate. One thing’s for sure, with the new Facebook Product Ads, Facebook has brought to market a killer product that drives efficient product-level retargeting on all devices.

The only indirect impact to the retargeting market is that Facebook Product Ads are a
transparent, open-book set of tools giving performance marketers granular views on
performance, frequency, bids, etc., by offering the inventory on an auction basis. Given the prevalence of arbitrage business models in the retargeting space, some may ask why anyone would pay any percentage for CPM margins if the inventory can be bought directly from Facebook.

In early beta tests, we are finding the ROI is compelling, with comparable ROI to FBX and more importantly access to Facebook mobile Newsfeed inventory, which was blocked until recently.

Given that Facebook boasts 20% of all mobile inventory globally, you could argue that one of the key, and most disruptive, benefits of Facebook Product Ads is now it finally gives back control to the end advertiser – another reason why Facebook could soon be eating Google’s lunch.