The social network has launched a new way for advertisers to drive more awareness of their app, page or place. Facebook announced a Sponsored Results API that is available for developers to sponsor search results.

Advertisers will have the ability to embed ads in the list of results within Facebook’s toolbar when a user conducts a search. Facebook says that the ads will have a 70 character message and lead users to Facebook pages or apps and can target Facebook entities, such as Pages, Places or Apps. The Sponsored Results can not drive traffic off-site to an advertiser’s web site and must stay on the social network.

Bidding for Sponsored Results on Facebook will be on a cost-per-click (CPC) model or an optimized cost-per-thousand (CPM) model. The minimum bid price is $0.01 for targeting the same entity that you are promoting and $0.15 for targeting other entities on Facebook.

The Sponsored Results will only appear when a user conducts a search using a desktop device, and are not yet available on mobile devices. Facebook says that advertisers can create Sponsored Results using the Facebook Power Editor, which was released a few months ago.

The social network says that their search function is one of the most utilized features on its site, which enables advertisers to impress their ads in a new way on Facebook.

Below is a screen shot of an example of Sponsored Results API that Facebook has released.

The social network, Facebook, will be updating their advertising capabilities to increase user engagement and purchase intent. Facebook is set to announce the new ads at a February 29 media event in New York.

The new ads on Facebook will be social by default, meaning they will automatically show users when their friends have already Liked the advertiser. In addition, the new ad formats will draw their content exclusively from posts to brands’ Facebook pages, instead of written advertising copy from the advertiser.

Other changes to Facebook ads include:

• Larger ad formats

• More interaction with the ads; users will be able to comment under ads

• Six new premium ad types: Photo, Video, Question, Status, Event and Link

• Advertisers will have the ability to change ad content on a daily basis by creating a new post on the brand’s Facebook page

The social network believes that the future of online advertising lies within content, rather than the messaging, and ads that are endorsed by the people you know have a better chance of capturing your attention. The company says that the new ads will produce more engagement, better recall, and a significant increase in purchase intent.

Facebook says that Marketplace and self-service ads will not be affected and that reporting and metrics will not be upgraded.

MySpace launches a new do-it-yourself CPC program for placing ads on its site.  The service launched in beta, allows anyone to promote their business on MySpace.com.
You can choose to either upload your own ad or create one by choosing from twelve templates created by MySpace. After selecting a template and uploading an image to place in your ad, users get to select their target audience: gender, age, region, city/state, and interests. For example, you can target women between the ages of 27-52 who live in California.

You also have the capability of setting the budget to what you are willing to spend on the overall ad campaign.  After reviewing the details of your ad campaign and providing your credit card number, you’re up and running.

Earlier this year, Facebook launched a very similar CPC program, with many of the same features for targeting users.  I am currently running a handful of clients in Facebook and the results are mixed so far. A client looking for good branding in either network should work well. It’s low cost traffic with the potential of reaching over 100 million users. If your product is a more niche, it may not perform as well in a social network. It’s a good idea to make sure you are making your demographic targeting very specific.

If you are running a CPC program in Facebook, it’s worth a shot to test the MySpace waters, and see how they both perform. It may just boil down to the demographics of each, with MySpace claiming to have a larger share of the 30 – 50 age group. With something new, I have always found that testing is usually the best way to go.