Facebook Gives Advertisers Ability To Target Mobile Users By Bandwidth

In a move to hone its advertising efficiency in emerging markets, Facebook announced today that advertisers can now target users by the speed of their mobile network connections.

The new feature is intended to help marketers trying to reach customers in the developing world, where Facebook’s audience is growing rapidly but Internet connection speeds are all over the place. Serving video ads, for instance, to someone in Bali with a 2G connection isn’t going to do anyone — users or advertisers — any good.

Previously, Facebook offered device and operating system targeting ability — smartphones, tablets, feature phones, Android and iOS — but advertisers, Facebook said, asked for bandwidth segmentation. Facebook’s Brendan Sullivan explained further in a blog post:

Targeting by mobile network type helps advertisers choose creative that will run smoothly on any given device and connection speed. For example, serving a video ad to people in Indonesia with 2G connections may mean wasted impressions if people are unable to load the video or it buffers for minutes when clicked. Optimizing the creative — for instance, targeting a video campaign to people with high-speed connections, and swapping in an image or link ad for people with slower connections — means ads can perform more efficiently for the people seeing them.

Bandwidth targeting is available to advertisers globally via the Ad Create tool, Power Editor and the API, Facebook said.