Back in June, Facebook announced that it was going to get rid of some of its ad units in an effort to eliminate some redundancies, as many of its offerings accomplished the same goals.
The company hinted at the demise of the Sponsored Story unit, instead opting to “include the best of sponsored stories in all ads.”
“Previously, to get the best social context available, advertisers had to purchase sponsored stories in addition to ads,” Facebook’s Fidji Simo said at the time. “In the future, for example, when you create a Page post photo ad, we will automatically add social context to boost performance and eliminate the extra step of creating sponsored stories. We know social enhances ad resonance; people are influenced by this type of word-of-mouth marketing. Research from Nielsen, comScore, and Datalogix shows that social context can drive awareness and return on ad spend, so we want to make it easier to add it to our ads. These changes will happen in the fall.”
In the breaking changes on its developer site (hat tip: AllFacebook), Facebook says it will sunset the creation of sponsored stories on April 9th when domain and open graph sponsored stories will no longer be allowed to be created, and existing ones will cease to have delivery.
“Page post and page like ads already automatically have the best social context (likes and comments) added,” the page reiterates.
Last month, Facebook introduced its new video ads as well as desktop app ads.
Image via Facebook