Facebook is now offering advertisers new performance metrics about how their Sponsored Stories perform in the News Feed, including the average position where the story was inserted within the feed.

This follows recent developments allowing advertisers to decide whether they want their Sponsored Stories to appear in the News Feeds or on mobile, increasing both control and performance data to optimise campaigns.

Choice placement

Previously, advertisers could not choose where their Sponsored Stories were shown, and did receive a breakdown of performance by placement.

However, earlier in June Facebook advertisers were given the ability to buy Sponsored Stories in the News Feed and on mobile separately from other ad placements by using the Ads API or Power Editor tool.

This allowed advertisers to specifically indicate that they want their ads to be shown in the mobile News Feed, presenting new opportunities for marketers to reach Facebook users while on their phones.

More metrics

Facebook has followed this development with the introduction of increased performance metrics for Sponsored Stories, allowing advertisers not only more control over their ads but also more performance data to be able to optimise their campaigns.

The new metric allows users to see separate news feed data for each ad placement, helping advertisers understand how their ads are performing on the social network and how they might better optimise campaigns.

Higher clickthrough

Several early tests have found that News Feed-based ads have significantly higher clickthrough rates than sidebar ads. As Facebook provides data to show how well ads work within the feed, advertisers may increasingly want to run ads in that placement.

The Average News Feed position metric was first discussed with Facebook Preferred Marketing Developers in June, but did not appear on the social network’s ads application-programming interface until late last week.