by Laurie Sullivan @lauriesullivan, July 17, 2017

Facebook recently announced it will start serving ads inside Marketplace in the United States, but the opportunities for search advertisers are still a ways off.

The Craigslist-like hub that launched in October 2016 pulls items in based on the user’s location. It allows members to post, sell and buy items.

A select number of advertisers have been invited to test the ads for free. The ads will appear on mobile devices in the U.S. in the main feed of Marketplace, not the categories. Only a small percentage of people will see the ads during the test phase.

Opportunities for search within Marketplace ads abound. In May, more than 18 million items were posted in Marketplace within the United States.

Users can search for products and filter the content, but the ads are not based on search triggers. That may happen in the future, said Mike Manning, communications manager at Facebook. It’s still early days, he said.

Household, Electronics and Apparel are some of the categories. Tapping on the image reveals more details from the seller about the product, along with the general location.

Facebook pulls the assets—images and text—from creative that advertisers run in the News Feed to create the sponsored native-looking ads in Marketplace.

In 2017, eMarketer estimates 2.46 billion people, or one-third of the global population, will access social networks at least once monthly, up 8.2% from 2016. Facebook will take 16.2%, or $36 billion, of the ad revenue share worldwide this year, per the analyst firm. Google will take nearly $74 billion.

When it comes to global ad search revenue, Facebook doesn’t make the cut. Google is at 62%; Baidu, 6.6%; Microsoft, 4.9%; Yahoo at 1.5%; Sohu.com, 0.5% round out the top five in 2017, according to eMarketer.

MediaPost.com: Search Marketing Daily

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