In a bid to get marketers to spend more money, Facebook is simplifying the advertising options offered advertisers. In the next six months, Facebook plans to streamline the number of ad units from 27 to fewer than half of that while mapping all of its ads to the business objectives marketers care about - be it in-store sales, online conversions, app installs, etc.

Facebook noticed that many of the ad units it has been providing accomplished the same goals, so the company is cutting out these redundancies. This includes removing the 'Questions product for Pages' because marketers can simply ask a question in a post and get answers in comments. It also means removing the online 'Offer product' because marketers have found that using a Page post link ad is a more effective way to drive people to deals on their websites. These changes will be made next month.

Previously, to get the best social context available, advertisers had to purchase sponsored stories in addition to ads. In the future, for example, when an advertiser creates a Page post photo ad, Facebook will automatically add social context to boost performance and eliminate the extra step of creating sponsored stories. These changes will happen in the fall.

Facebook also plans to make ad units look more consistent. This will reduce the number of ad formats and make the ad creation process much simpler for advertisers who run multiple campaigns or want to test which ad creative performs the best. These changes will start happening in late June.

Facebook had nearly $4.3 billion in advertising revenue in 2012, but since it went public, it has faced persistent doubts whether it can significantly grow its advertising business.