In business, every investment is made with a profit in mind. And when Facebook acquired WhatsApp, everyone was looking at Facebook with suspicion. Since the Facebook-owned Messenger and Instagram are already flooded with Ads, we were expecting the same from WhatsApp. But the company held the plan for a while, improved the features in WhatsApp and made it more usable. Now the company might have noticed the iron getting hot. So they finally announced that there will be Ads on WhatsApp from now on. Not just yet, the officials have stated the company will start rolling Ads on the WhatsApp app on 2020.
In the annual Facebook Marketing Summit, officials clarified that WhatsApp soon would come with advertisements inside the app. Among the various type of Ad-types on their plan, the first one would be Instagram Stories like Status feature. The Stories feature on Facebook and Instagram is very popular. And the platforms are generating substantial revenue for the company as well. With that success story, the company might have expected to achieve similar success from the WhatsApp. This type of Ad will occupy the entire screen for better efficacy.
But not just the stories with regular text and images, the company also announced to include swipe-up links to explain the in-depth details about the advertising campaign and the advertiser. However, this type of Ads won’t unveil the Advertiser’s contact name. It would rather showcase the name of the Advertising Company.
Although the company’s representatives explained the Stories-like Ad quite clearly, they haven’t explicitly mentioned their plans regarding other Ad types. But since Facebook is planning to monetize this messaging platform quite aggressively, WhatsApp may not just stick with the Stories-like Ads. We can also expect small display Ads between the chats on the conversation lists just like on the Messenger.
Furthermore, WhatsApp has further plans to improve WhatsApp as a business platform. The company has quite clearly mentioned that the new ads, which link directly to these accounts would soon be making their way over to both Facebook and Instagram. The WhatsApp Business users will also be privileged with “Richer Message Formats”. This feature basically involves pairing images and PDF files with a short price of the text.
apart from that, Facebook also plans to ease the advertisers on marketing their products by integrating the WhatsApp’s existing product catalog with Facebook Business Manager. The Product Catalog is that type of feature, which helps the users to see all the products enlisted on the company’s product lineup. It would also help the advertising company to provide additional information about a certain product and more products on their lineup through private conversations with the customers.
