How To Add Advertisements To Facebook Instant Articles

In the earlier article, I have shared the complete guide on setting up of Facebook Instant articles for your WordPress blog.

In this article, you will learn about making money from Instant articles. This is an important step for everyone who has enabled Instant articles & want to make money from your blog as by default Instant articles doesn’t show any ads & you will not be earning any money otherwise.

In this guide, I will talk about enabling Facebook audience network ads to Instant articles. Think of Audience network ads as “AdSense for Facebook“, but the difference here is:

• The fill rate & CPM is pretty high in comparison to other ad networks.
• The ads shown on your Instant articles pages will be targeted based on user demographic & interest.

Here is what Facebook has to say about Audience network ads:

Audience Network provides publishers and developers with engaging, high performing ad units backed by Facebook’s 3 million advertisers. Audience Network extends the reach of Facebook campaigns beyond Facebook, and provides publishers a way to monetize their content with relevant, better-targeted ads and innovative native ad formats.

Step by step guide to enable Audience network ads:

Go to your Facebook page Instant articles settings & under tools, look for audience network.

Check the box & click on get started. This should bring up a screen like this:

Click on your dashboard. Here we will create the ad placement. Click on the placements tab & that should bring up a screen as shown below:

Click on Create Ad placement & give it a meaningful name. It’s important to give a meaningful name as it would help us to track reporting by unique ad locations in Instant Articles.

You have the option to select from 3 different ad types:

1. Banner
2. Interstitial (App only)
3. Native

Instream video ad option will be added in coming days.

For now, select banner ad format & click on save. Now, you should be able to see the ad placement ID or you can click on get code to access Javascript code for implementing ads.

Since we are using official Facebook instant articles plugin, we just need placement ID to get started with this.

Login to your WordPress dashboard & go to instant articles settings.

Look for ads section.

• Select Ad type: Facebook audience network
• Copy the Audience Network Placement ID
• Select the ads dimension

Click on save & that’s it!

Getting paid by Facebook audience network:

With the above steps, we have configured ads on Instant articles. Now, it’s time to fill out the payment information so that we can get paid.

On the Facebook audience network dashboard, click on Payout & you would see a screen like this:

Create a new company:

Click on register a new company & start filling out the form.

Currently, Facebook pays the publishers in two ways:

• PayPal
• Direct bank deposit

You can use either one of them. I prefer using direct bank deposit as by using PayPal, I would lose out a considerable amount of money due to currency conversion.

If you are from India & using direct bank deposit, you can use this guide to configure your payout information. (It’s same as direct bank deposit offered by Google AdSense)

Note: When I selected “Link an existing PayPal account” for payout, it showed me this warning “Please note you’ll need to complete additional verification for your bank account so you can start receiving payouts.”. At this point, I’m not sure what’s the additional verification for. In case if you select PayPal & follow the additional verification, let us know the steps in the comment section below.

Complete the rest two steps & this would complete the process of creating a company. Now, the next step is to add Tax forms.

Tax forms:

Those who are in affiliate marketing or getting paid from ad network from different countries might be accustomed to filling out the tax forms. (US foreign corrupt practices ACT – Seriously? )

Anyways, right click on the form you are entitled to & save it on your desktop.

Tip: Bloggers outside U.S. who have not formed a company or working as a part-time blogger should select W-8BEN (non-US Individual Taxpayers)

Open the download .pf file  & fill out the form. Should not take more than 2 minutes. Once you have filled the form, upload “Required tax document” & click on save.

Note: After clicking the save, you might need to select company’s name from drop down & click on save changes to associate updated tax forms with the company.

This is how the final screen should be:

Note: You can always change your information if required. But do know that, Facebook will hold your payout for 10 days if you update your payment information. Your earnings will be paid out after the holding period.

You do have the option to disable ads from certain categories or disable specific app or domain ads. In the coming days, I will cover this in detail. You can download our free Android app or SML iOS App to get notified when I do that.

Audience network Performance dashboard Explained:

Now, let me quickly explain the Performance tab. It would take time (Depending on the traffic) to see the performance tab. I’m taking an example from below screen to explain the various metrics mentioned in Performance dashboard.

• Requests: After placing the Audience network ad code, every time your instant articles request an ad from Facebook is called Requests. In the above screenshot row 1: 790,757 times ads are requested from Facebook.
• Filled: Each time Facebook fulfilled the request is called Filled. Example from row 1 in the above screenshot: Facebook fulfilled 559,407 requests Out of 790,757 requests.
• Impressions: Each time a user see an ad is called as Impressions. Example from row 1 in the above screenshot: 303,963 Impressions.
• Fill rate: The ratio of filled over requests. Ex: 70.74% filled rate for row 1.

Fill rate depends on two major factors:

1. If Facebook can map your user/reader with a Facebook user. In the case of Instant articles, the mapping percentage would be very high.
2. The advertiser demand for a particular user.

Important points:

• You get paid via PayPal or Direct bank deposit.
• You can disable ads from specific categories
• Payment will be sent out on 21st of each month for the previous month balance.
• Audience network doesn’t disclose their revenue share.

With this, you should be able to start monetizing Instant articles on Facebook. If you have further questions or have any doubt, feel free to ask me in the comment section below. If you found this guide useful, do share it on Facebook with your blogger friends.