NEW YORK – An executive from Facebook at ad:tech New York 2016 gave marketers a crash course in working within Facebook’s API, touting the platform’s fecundity as users spend 20 percent of their mobile time between Facebook and its largest acquisition, Instagram.

The Facebook: APIs & Automation talk touched on a number of difficulties that could plague marketers in trying to navigate the API platform, including topics in marketing optimization and even guidance on how best to put together the right team for Facebook marketing efforts.

“Mobile consumption is different,” said Elad Kolet, solutions engineering manager at Facebook. “People expect apps to be responsive.

“Facebook strength is all about taking signals.”

Facebook API navigation
The seminar began with counsel on solutions to develop corrections to drive value, which can be condensed into three major categories: efficiency, coming in the form of campaign automation; profitability in the form of data integration and measurement; and business differentiation.

And for marketing innovation, Mr. Kolet suggested a combination of engineering investment, a solution focus and agility.

Going deeper into the issue, Mr. Kolet advised abiding by four pillars for marketing optimization: Creative, in the form of innovations such as 360-degree video ª“Something you will see both brands ad marketers leveraging on Facebook API”); Targeting in the form of custom audiences and Facebook Lookalike Audiences; Signals and Optimization through protocols such as Facebook Pixel; and Measurement through attribution models (“We should always be calibrating our attribution models with testing”).

Mr. Kolet also introduced his colleague, Evan Wong, who is a solutions engineer for automotive at Facebook. Mr. Wong presented a case study involving automotive information Web site edmunds.com as a paragon of success in leveraging Facebook API.

The brand managed to use Facebook’s Lookalike Audiences to increase their reach, resulting in a 45 percent increase in unique visitors, a 17 percent increase in visits to partnering dealerships and a 23 percent increase in exposure to target audience.

A brief primer on utilization of Facebook’s Dynamic Ads

Marketing guidance
Mr. Kolet also offered guidance on best practices for an ‘all-in’ partner looking to work within Facebook’s API. First, be bid constrained as opposed to budget or audience constrained; second, be sure to constantly test and scale; third, build a relevant team; and last, implement instrumentation for reporting.

He finished the seminar with a brief overview of Facebook’s Dynamic Ads platform, which marketers can leverage to show relevant ads to relevant people at a relevant time, providing a cohesive solution to many optimization challenges marketers face. Facebook recently announced Dynamic Ads for the Travel and Retail sectors.

Overall, the seminar contained valuable information for those marketers trying to find success within what is sometimes described as an abstruse and esoteric advertising medium.