Facebook’s external advertising network has more than reach — it has customer loyalty

Facebook’s Audience Network, its mobile ad network, has been a big success in generating customer loyalty, according to a new study.

Facebook unveiled Audience Network last April and launched it widely in October, calling the tool “a new way for advertisers to extend their campaigns beyond Facebook and into other mobile apps.” It leverages the targeting of normal Facebook ads and extends them to app-based mobile experiences.

The research released today (sign-up required), by mobile app marketing platform Fiksu, suggests that marketers who utilize Audience Network are seeing a significant return on their investment. Key findings include:

• The Audience Network generates 25 percent more returning users than display ads and only 5 percent less than Facebook’s News Feed itself.
• The cost per purchaser on Audience Network was just a fifth of display networks.
• The average revenue per purchasing user on Audience Network was $3.64, higher than $1.63 for News Feed and 24 times that of display.

Fiksu also said that conversion rates on Audience Network are almost 10 percent higher than on News Feed, and 25 percent more than display. “This demonstrates the power of Audience Network’s targeting capabilities, as the users who did click had a much higher propensity to be the right users,” Fiksu wrote in a summary of its research.

“To help marketers understand performance differences between Facebook’s Audience Network, traditional Facebook News Feed ads, and other display networks, [we] analyzed loyalty/ROI metrics across a set of apps running on all three segments,” Fiksu wrote in an introduction to its research. “While performance varied, our analysis showed that overall, even though Audience Network ads had lower click-through rates and higher [cost per impression] than other sources, user quality proved to be similar to News Feed.”

Fiksu wrote that it had worked with Facebook on testing Audience Network results. But Facebook did not immediately respond to a VentureBeat request for comment about Fiksu’s study.

Fiksu’s data comes on the same day that Facebook will release its fourth-quarter earnings report.