Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB)’s Custom Audience catches on

Facebook Inc(NASDAQ:FB) pleasantly surprised its investors when its third quarter results showed that the company is serious about growing its revenues, especially on mobile devices.

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The company has taken several measures to increase its ad-based revenues and also launched several products in the recent past.

For instance, Facebook offers is now available as a mobile app. Then it took its app install program out of beta for mobile app developers.

But the biggest initiative seems to be the product called Facebook Custom Audience. This is a feature that may lead to privacy issues, though Facebook is trying to make it as secure as possible.

Under Custom Audience, marketers can upload details of their offline users on Facebook. This means that if you are an advertiser then you can take an email list or phone list of your current customers, prospects, loyalty club members and so on and upload that information on to Facebook.

The social network will use that information - after encrypting that data to maintain user privacy - to serve the users targeted ads as they spend time browsing the site.

According to reports the initial response and results from Custom Audience has been encouraging.

One of the very first companies to use the feature was e-commerce company Open Sky, which claimed that it was able to increase its conversion rates by 34 percent after using it.

The Washington Post’s ad arm SocialLike reported that Custom Audience delivered a 15% lower Cost-per-Like and 87% higher Impression-to-Like rate.

Targeted advertising has long been used by Facebook, as it has attempted to keep track of users and sites they visit after logging out of the social network.