Video ads coming to a Facebook mobile app near you

Facebook announced this morning that it is allowing advertisers to target mobile consumers with video ads. Yup, full-video commercials are coming to your Facebook app on both iPhone and Android.

The ad type is targeted at companies promoting their mobile apps:

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“Potential customers will be able to click play to watch a video featuring your mobile app before installing the app,” Facebook’s Radu Margarint posted this morning. “Video creative has proven to be an effective way to drive engagement in News Feed, and we look forward to helping developers use their video creative to find new app installs.”

This is probably not as big a deal as it may sound, since not much will change with the ad format itself. Now, instead of an image, there’s simply a clickable movie still. If you don’t tap, there’s no video — it’s not autoplay, which would be guaranteed to annoy. Still, it’d be nice if Facebook’s feature beta customer for the new video ad type was not a digital casino, which leaves a slightly bad taste in the mouth:

“In our early tests, we found that using video in our mobile app ads resulted in increased install rates and decreased costs per install,” John Clelland, a marketing VP for DoubleDown Casino said in a statement. “We’ve seen tremendous success with mobile app ads and are looking forward to using video to make them even more engaging with rich media like video.”

Facebook made no mention of any limitation on the length of the video, so presumably advertisers can add as long a video as they think audiences will watch.

At the same time, Facebook also announced another mobile ad type, a cost-per-action mobile app install ad.

Previously, the company had offered cost-per-click and cost-per-impression; now the company has filled out its suite of monetization options by adding a pay-only-if-you-get-the-install option, in which you can essentially get a guarantee that you are not wasting your money.

Facebook says that the new option reduces mobile app marketer costs by 20 percent per install, which is fairly impressive and which says that Facebook is going all in for the lucrative app-install market. And that Facebook is now a go-to ad venue for app developers looking to onboard users. That 20 percent savings, however, is based on a very small sample size: eight advertisers over a two-month trial period.

And there’s one little caveat:

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“In order to bid on CPA, you need to be measuring installs for your ad campaign, either by integrating with our SDK or working with a mobile measurement partner,” Margarint said.

Facebook will gradually be rolling out these options to advertisers over the next few days.