Facebook passes 2M advertisers and launches Ads Manager for iOS

Facebook yesterday made two major announcements related to its advertising business. The company has passed 2 million advertisers on its platform and has launched an Ads Manager mobile app.

2 Million and Counting

The 2 million figure, it’s important to emphasize, refers to active advertisers, meaning these are customers that regularly buy ads through the company. In a thank you letter to these individuals and brands, Facebook’s chief executive Mark Zuckerberg and chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg wrote the following:

Our mission is to make the world more open and connected, and an important part of that is helping people connect with businesses. Today, we want to express our thanks to you and all of our advertising partners — 2 million strong and growing every day. We’re going to keep working to serve you better, so you can continue creating jobs and opportunities in your community, and moving the entire world forward.

In other words, thanks for all the dough — keep it coming!

For the sake of comparison, when Google celebrated 10 years of AdSense in June 2013, the company said it had over 2 million publishers. Earlier this month, Facebook turned 11 years old, but it only started to get serious about advertising when it became a public company in May 2012, less than three years ago.

Ads Manager

In July 2014, Facebook launched an Ads Manager tool that was available as part of its mobile site, as well as its main Android and iOS apps. The company says the tool is now used by more than 800,000 advertisers each month, or about 40 percent of its active advertisers. Not bad for a mobile feature.

Today, the company is breaking out the Ads Manager feature into a separate app for iOS, which you can download now from Apple’s App Store. Facebook promises the app lets marketers track ad performance, edit existing ads, edit ad budgets and schedules, receive push notifications, and of course, create ads.

In short, as its name implies, the app lets you manage ads on the go. The company is still building the equivalent app for Android, and says it will launch “later this year.”

Like Google, ads are Facebook’s main source of revenue. Given that 69 percent of its ad revenue now comes from mobile, the company logically needs to keep pushing its tools so they’re available on mobile as well.

[venturebeat]