Nextdoor Confirmed to be Part of Facebook Audience Network

Within the last couple weeks, sharp observers here at Mediagistic have begun to notice that our clients’ Facebook ads are appearing on Nextdoor, the “world’s largest” social networking app for neighborhoods. I recently reached out to our agency contacts at Facebook, and they confirmed for us that Nextdoor is, indeed, now part of the Facebook Audience Network (FAN).

Although Facebook was unable to tell us how long Nextdoor had been part of FAN, I pulled Facebook’s publisher list and it appears that Nextdoor has been included in our clients’ FAN placements within the last 30-90 days. So what does this mean for home services brands? Read on to learn more about Nextdoor, FAN and how this impacts digital marketing campaigns.

What is Nextdoor?

It’s hard to say that Nextdoor is exactly the “new kid on the block” since the privately held California-based company was founded back in 2008 and the app was launched in 2011. In recent years, though, the network has grown to 236,000 neighborhoods, 10+ million users and a $2.1 billion valuation.

The app revolves around “neighborhoods,” as initially defined by data culled from geographic boundary data firm Maponics and subsequent user-generated content. Day-to-day interactions on the platform revolve around sharing neighborhood news, debating local issues and ordinances, complaining about noisy neighbors, discussing local eateries, rehoming or locating pets, posting items for sale, and sharing recommendations for local service providers.

The last item, in fact, constitutes a huge percentage of user behavior on this platform. According to a piece published last year in the Atlantic, “Service requests and recommendations constitute 30 percent of chatter, and discussions of real estate make up another 20 percent.” In other words, Nextdoor is a place where homeowners are highly engaged with their own local community and are actively seeking advice from their neighbors about local service providers.

So it’s a no-brainer that home services brands should prioritize claiming and verifying their Nextdoor listing. And this also means that Nextdoor ad placements translate into tremendous upside for brands in this space.

How the Facebook Audience Network (FAN) Works

Introduced in 2014, FAN is Facebook’s own home-grown version of the Google Display Network (GDN). It increases the visibility of advertisers’ Facebook ads via off-Facebook platforms like third party blogs, news sites, in-stream videos, and apps.

The current list of publishers in the network is truly enormous. By my count — between the audience network, instant article and instream-videos list I downloaded — it includes more than 12,000 different placements. The list itself also requires no small amount of sifting around the platform to find and review, which (in context with the sheer number of FAN placements) explains why adding one single site into the network can go unnoticed for several weeks or even months.

The network has some significant limitations; for instance, advertisers don’t have a ton of control over the publisher sites where the ads are placed. There also aren’t very many options for attribution, as individual UTM codes and placement-by-placement reporting are not currently available in the Facebook Business Manager.

But the upside generally outweighs the negatives here — when Hootsuite and AdEspresso did an analysis in 2017 of the CPC across all of Facebook’s placements, they determined that FAN ads had the lowest cost-per-click by placement. According to the study by AdEspresso, “The audience network was easily the most affordable, as it has been for some time. Enabling this placement in your campaigns can therefore keep your cost average low, giving you more potential placements.”

What this Means for Home Services Brands

The endgame here is fairly straightforward. All of this means that, if you’re already advertising on Facebook and using FAN placements, then your ads are now appearing on Nextdoor as well. So for basic advertising visibility on the Nextdoor platform, your bases are essentially covered and you have access to prime advertising real estate.

This is doubly powerful because there’s a large barrier to entry for Nextdoor advertising outside of FAN. At the time of writing this blog, Nextdoor has no self-service advertising options (unlike Google, Facebook, Snapchat, etc.) and it only caters to advertisers enterprise-level budgets. The minimum advertising investment for an insertion order is $7,500 to $25,000 (depending on who’s negotiating the ad placements for you).

For advertisers who are nonetheless interested in advertising directly with Nextdoor, it’s important to understand that the minimums are based on insertion orders. So digital agencies like Mediagistic, which work with hundreds of local and regional SMBs, can leverage group buying power to purchase ads for multiple, independently owned companies via one insertion order at a negotiated rate.

Are you interested in running ads on Nextdoor, either directly or through the Facebook Audience Network? Learn more about Mediagistic’s digital marketing programs or group and co-op programs. Or just call us today to speak with one of our knowledgeable digital marketing experts to find out what options are available for your business.

Eddie Childs is the Inbound Marketing Manager for Mediagistic. His writing has been published by a range of websites and publications including Copypress.com, Jambase.com, NFLSoup.com, FootballNation.com, and Boating World, KnowAtlanta, Men’s Book, Cobb in Focus, TCL, Blush, Charged Electric Vehicles, Business to Business, and Catalyst magazines. Follow him on Twitter and connect with him on Linkedin.

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