I want to thank the entire Facebook community, our employees, our partners and our stockholders for their continued support. Because of your contribution Facebook continues to grow in strength, and create greater value in the world for people, partners and businesses. We have long journey ahead, we are on the right path and I am excited about the progress that we are making. Thank you! Know here is Sheryl.
Sheryl K. Sandberg, Chief Operating Officer, Director, Facebook
Thanks, Mark and hi everyone! We had another strong quarter and we are continuing to execute well on our priorities capitalizing on the shift to mobile, growing the number of Facebook marketers and building products to make our ads more relevant. Our goal this quarter was again very broad based. We had strong performance around the world as well as across verticals in our marketer segments – brands, direct marketers, developers and small and medium businesses. I’d like to briefly highlight some of our progress on the products’ front and then focus on important new investments for making an ad tag. One of our main ad products is to make ads more relevant. Just like content and news feed when ads are more relevant they provide better experience for people using Facebook and a better return for marketers.
One of the best ways to improve relevance is to help advertisers reach the right audience for their messages. Facebook’s age and gender targeting is 45% more accurate than the digital industry average. Working with Facebook advertisers can also target based on people’s interests. In addition, we are continuing to build app-customer audiences which enable marketers to use their own data to segment current and prospective customers. We are pleased with the response from clients and we are focused on driving deeper penetration with both existing and new clients. We also offer look-a-like audiences which help marketers find potential new customers who are similar to their current customers.
To share one recent example earlier this year Global Financial Services company MetLife wanted to find new customers for life insurance policies. Working with this agency Mercol, they use look-a-like audiences to find people more like their existing customers. Met Life run ads that led people to their get a quote website page. Over the 6 month campaign the leads that came from Facebook resulted in new policies at a 2.4 times higher rate than Met Life’s next desk performing channel and it has to cost of display ads. We are also making steady progress at newer ads initiative. Throughout this quarter we continued to enable auto play for more video ads. We are also continuing to roll out ads on Instagram. We think that there are big opportunities with both video and Instagram ads but we are going to remain deliberate and slow in our approach to scaling both businesses.
