The Truth About Meta’s Audience Network: Should You Use It?
What is the Audience Network?
Meta’s Audience Network enables advertisers to take their Facebook and Instagram ads beyond the native platforms, allowing them to connect with users on third-party apps and websites. This option is intended to amplify ad campaigns by increasing both reach and impressions across Meta’s network of partner applications (Meta).
At first glance, Audience Network appears to offer benefits such as a larger audience reach, potentially lower cost-per-impression (CPM), and more inventory for advertisers. Nevertheless, many marketers are uncertain if this placement actually provides high-quality outcomes.
Why is Meta So Insistent on Audience Network?
Meta strongly pushes advertisers to utilise Audience Network by automatically activating it in their campaign settings. The driving force behind this? Revenue. With Facebook's ad space being finite, Audience Network offers extra inventory, allowing advertisers to keep spending while Meta benefits from placements on external sites (Power).
Meta asserts that Audience Network enables brands to attain broader reach and engagement. Nevertheless, numerous marketers feel that ads displayed on third-party apps lack transparency and control, frequently leading to wasted ad budgets and low-quality traffic (LinkedIn).
Why You Should Avoid Audience Network
While Meta promotes Audience Network as a valuable advertising option, data and experiences from advertisers indicate otherwise. Here are some important reasons to reconsider enabling it:
Low-Quality Traffic & Click Fraud: A number of placements within Audience Network are found on low-quality apps, frequently linked to bot traffic and accidental clicks, which not only inflate costs but also rarely lead to conversions (Jon Loomer).
Limited Transparency & Poor Control: Unlike platforms like Facebook and Instagram, advertisers lack full visibility into where their ads are displayed, raising significant concerns about brand safety (Birch).
Ineffective for Lead Generation & Sales: If your objective is lead generation or sales, Audience Network typically fails to provide high-intent traffic. Instead, it commonly results in poor conversion rates due to unintentional clicks and a lack of genuine interest from users (LinkedIn).
The Data Doesn’t Lie: The Case Against Audience Network
Studies and reports from advertisers frequently highlight poor performance metrics of Audience Network. Some critical points include:
Audience Network's average Click-Through Rate (CTR) is just 0.03%, which is significantly below that of Facebook and Instagram placements (AOK Marketing).
Ad fraud is a pressing concern, with reports indicating that over 50% of clicks might come from bots or happen by accident (AOK Marketing).
The higher bounce rates suggest that most users clicking on Audience Network ads do not intend to engage meaningfully (AOK Marketing).
Can You Still Get Good Results?
Although Audience Network isn't the top option for most advertisers, some companies have found success by using it in a strategic manner:
Retargeting campaigns can be effective if the audience is already familiar with your brand (KlientBoost).
App Install campaigns may benefit from lower CPMs when targeting mobile users (Meta).
However, for most businesses, direct placements on Facebook and Instagram generally yield the best results, providing higher intent traffic and better conversion rates.
Conclusion
While Meta's Audience Network provides a wider reach, it frequently does not yield satisfactory results. Issues like poor transparency, excessive bot activity, and low conversion rates make it a precarious option for many advertisers. To achieve better outcomes, it's advisable to concentrate on high-performing placements such as Facebook and Instagram Feeds, Stories, and Reels.
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