Why Facebook Advertising Matters at 800 Million Users

Facebook passed 800 million active users this year, which puts it in a category of scale that almost nothing else in advertising can match outside of television. What makes that scale useful to a marketer, rather than just an impressive number, is what Facebook knows about each of those users: their age, location, relationship status, employer, interests and the pages they’ve chosen to follow, all volunteered by the users themselves rather than inferred from browsing behavior the way most display targeting works.

Targeting precision most channels can’t offer

A display network can guess at a user’s interests from the sites they’ve visited. Facebook doesn’t have to guess, because people tell it directly by filling out a profile and clicking “like” on things they care about. That difference matters enormously for cost efficiency: an advertiser selling running gear can target people who’ve liked specific running brands or races, in a specific age range, in specific cities, and reach almost nobody outside that audience. Compare that to a banner buy on a general sports site, where a large share of impressions inevitably reach people with no relevant interest at all, and the case for Facebook’s targeting becomes obvious.

The Page as an owned asset

Beyond individual campaigns, running Facebook ads well typically means building a Page audience over time, using ads to earn “likes” from people interested in the brand. Once someone likes a Page, a business can reach them again through organic posts without paying for another ad, which functions as a kind of owned audience that keeps compounding rather than resetting with every campaign. Sponsored Stories, which Facebook introduced in January, extend that further by turning a friend’s like or check-in into a small paid ad shown to their network, borrowing the credibility of a personal recommendation rather than relying purely on brand messaging.

Lower cost per reach than most alternatives

Facebook’s ad inventory is priced through an auction, but the sheer volume of ad space available across such a large user base keeps costs meaningfully lower than comparably targeted display or even some search terms. For a brand trying to reach a specific demographic slice cheaply and repeatedly, rather than chasing a narrow set of expensive keywords, Facebook’s cost per thousand impressions is often a fraction of what the same audience would cost through a television buy or a premium display placement.

Where it’s still finding its footing as a direct-response tool

Facebook ads have historically performed better for awareness and engagement (likes, comments, shares) than as a hard direct-response channel driving immediate purchases, and that’s still broadly true today. Click-through rates on Facebook ads tend to run lower than on high-intent search ads, which makes sense: someone browsing their friends’ updates isn’t in the same buying mindset as someone actively searching for a product. The advertisers getting the best results treat Facebook as a channel for building demand and audience over time rather than expecting the same immediate return they’d get from a well-run search campaign.

The bottom-line argument

• Cost efficiency at scale. Reaching a precisely defined demographic costs meaningfully less on Facebook than on most comparable channels.
• An owned audience that compounds. A Page’s fan base is reachable repeatedly without new ad spend for every touch.
• Data-driven targeting that doesn’t rely on guesswork. Profile and interest data volunteered by users beats inferred browsing behavior for accuracy.
• A genuine testing ground for creative and messaging. Fast, cheap iteration on ad copy and images teaches lessons that carry over to other channels.

Facebook advertising isn’t a replacement for search or a direct swap for display. It’s a channel built around who people are rather than what they happened to search for last, and for any business that can define its audience clearly, that’s an advantage worth building into next year’s budget rather than treating as an experiment on the side.