Audience Network is Meta’s advertising network of other companies’ mobile apps. When it is included in your placements, your Facebook and Instagram ads can also appear inside games, utility apps and other apps that have signed up to show Meta ads, with Meta sharing the revenue with those app publishers.
How Audience Network works
App publishers add Meta’s software to their apps and set aside space for ads: banners, native ads styled to fit the app, full-screen interstitials between levels of a game, and rewarded videos that people watch in exchange for an in-game reward. Meta fills those spaces with ads from its advertisers, using the same targeting and delivery system that runs Facebook and Instagram.
You do not set up Audience Network separately. It is one of the placements available to most campaigns, and it is included by default when you use Advantage+ Placements. Meta closed its mobile web and in-stream publisher inventory some years ago, so the network today is largely made up of mobile apps.
Your creative is adapted to fit each app’s format. A square image may be shown as a native ad with your headline and button, while a vertical video may appear full screen. Ads built only for the Instagram feed can look out of place here, so it is worth previewing the Audience Network versions in Ads Manager before launch.
Why it matters
Audience Network adds reach at a lower cost per thousand impressions than Meta’s own feeds, which can help awareness and app install campaigns. Meta has also argued that the extra inventory helps the system find converting customers more cheaply overall.
The risk is traffic quality. A full-screen ad in a mobile game invites accidental taps, and people in the middle of a game are rarely ready to fill in a quote form. A London plumbing firm optimising for link clicks might see a burst of cheap clicks from Audience Network and no extra calls. When the campaign optimises for real conversions, such as purchases or qualified leads, the system is better at steering away from that problem, but it is still worth checking.
Brand safety is the other consideration. Your ads may appear in apps you would not choose to be associated with, so Meta provides block lists, an inventory filter and a publisher list showing where ads have appeared.
Common mistakes
- Optimising for clicks with Audience Network on. This is where low-quality, accidental clicks are most likely to come from.
- Removing it without looking. For some accounts it produces real results at a good cost. Check the data first.
- Never reviewing where ads ran. The delivery report lists apps; a quick look can reveal ones you want to block.
- Judging it on click-through rate. A high click-through rate here often means misclicks rather than interest.
How to act on it
Open the placement breakdown for your campaigns and compare Audience Network with the other placements on cost per result, not cost per click. For lead generation, also compare lead quality, for example how many leads answered the phone. If Audience Network is taking a share of spend and returning poor results over a fair sample, exclude it in the ad set’s placement settings.
Give any change time to settle. Removing a placement alters how the whole ad set delivers, so compare a full week before and after rather than the first day or two.
If you keep it, set an inventory filter that suits your brand and add a block list for any app categories you want to avoid. Reviewing placements this way is part of my Facebook ads management service.