Originally posted on the Facebook Audience Network blog

A healthy advertising ecosystem often includes great experiences for people, meaningful business results for advertisers, sustainable growth for publishers, and efficient workflows for developers. Making sure these elements work together is the goal of Audience Network.

Creating this alignment is challenging, especially when much of the industry is still focused on clicks. Not all clicks are created equal, which creates a dilemma. Marketers commonly pay the same amount for someone who clicks on an ad and completes a purchase as they do for an unintentional click. In both cases, publishers are delivering exactly what they are asked for – clicks – but advertisers find wide variations in value.

So how do we reconcile this dilemma? At Audience Network, we believe it starts with quality. We define quality as ads served to real people, on brand-safe properties, with engaging experiences that lead to real outcomes for advertisers, sustainable businesses for publishers, and reliable performance for developers.

One way we optimize for real outcomes is through the signals advertisers send us. Over the past year, we’ve seen increases in advertisers using conversion signals to optimize their campaigns, such as app events and the Facebook pixel. These signals have allowed us to better understand what advertisers value.

Over the next few months, we’ll be making updates to Audience Network based on these new insights. These updates should allow us to improve our ability to value different ad placements. This means that Audience Network publishers may see fluctuations in their CPMs in either direction. We hope these updates will encourage publishers to develop high quality placements that are not optimized solely for click through rates.

We take our commitment to quality seriously – we want Audience Network to be the best place for advertisers, publishers, and developers to build their businesses.

If you're a publisher or developer looking for tips on how to make sure your ad placements are optimized to drive value, please refer to our native ad placement guidelines here. For additional questions, please reach out to your Audience Network representative.