Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB): Sterne Agee’s survey manages to prove the success of Mobile ads
The social networking site faced one of its biggest struggles with the advent of smartphones. More people started accessing the site through their phones, and adverts were not displayed prominently in those versions. Facebook started losing sponsors. This is when, during dire circumstances, the site came up with the idea of sponsored stories on mobiles. The survey by Agee shows that it was actually a success! However, the promoted posts were not taken to, quite as easily. The survey was conducted by Agee through the SurveyMonkey platform using 750 U.S based users as the respondents. It dug up a few interesting facts. 77 percent of the users had noticed the sponsored stories on their phones. However, they had not noticed the fact that these are mobile adverts.
54 percent of the respondents had become aware of the increase in the number of adverts given out by Facebook. 16 percent of the responders wanted to use the option of the “promoted posts” where a user will have to pay a nominal amount of money to make their post more prominent in the News Feed of their friends. 61 percent of the people said that the adverts being shown were as relevant as they had been six months ago. 45 percent of the people showed an increased amount of interest for “Facebook Gifts” and they wanted to try it out.
Half the number of respondents said that they were still spending the same amount of time on the social-networking site, as they had, about six months ago. 63 percent of the respondents admitted to logging into the site at least once, if not more, every single day. Some of them admitted to logging in multiple times a day.
61 percent of the users in the survey said that they now accessed the site through their smartphones, showing how Facebook had been right to be worried about the future of their adverts. The long-term opportunity for the site, if it keeps trying to adjust to the change of times and technology, is very lucrative, according to Sterne Agee.