Facebook Will Eliminate Sponsored Search Results in July

Facebook announced today that it plans to eliminate its sponsored search results as part of its recent push to streamline its advertising products.

Launched last August, the ad unit allowed businesses to run ads in the typeahead results that appear when members enter a search query. Although early sponsored results campaigns received a positive response, the company said it noticed that other ad types were used to achieve the same goal more effectively.

“We’ve seen that most marketers were buying sponsored results to advertise their apps and games, and we already offer mobile app install ads and Page post link ads on desktop to achieve the same goals,” stated a Facebook spokesperson.

The removal won’t happen immediately, so companies currently running sponsored results campaigns should take note and plan accordingly. Starting in July, you will no longer be able to buy the ad unit, and in mid to late July, members will stop seeing sponsored results.

However, it doesn’t mean that you won’t see any ads in Facebook Graph Search. The company noted that sponsored results were rolled out before Graph Search, so it’s now figuring out the best way to tailor ads specifically to the new feature. You can still buy ads on search result pages.

This is part of Facebook’s larger push to eliminate redundancies and simplify its ad products. The social network plans to cut down the current number of ad units from 27 to fewer than half of that in an effort to provide advertisers with a much more consistent and intuitive experience.

[Via: Inside Facebook, Image credit: SierraTierra]

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