Facebook Placement

In many cases, we recommend running your ads across Facebook’s family of apps and services. This gives Facebook’s delivery system more flexibility to get you more and better results.  Facebook calls the different places they can show your ads “placements .”  We make your placements selection in the “Placements” section of ad set creation. The available placements are:

• Facebook 

  • Feed
  • Instant Articles
  • In-stream videos
  • Right column
  • Marketplace
  • Stories

• Instagram

  • Feed
  • Stories

• Audience Network 

  • Native, banner and interstitial
  • In-stream videos
  • Rewarded videos

• Messenger 

  • Inbox
  • Sponsored messages

Note: Depending on your ad type, content and the design of its creative, every placement may not be available. Learn more about which objectives work with which placements.

There are two approaches to using placements, automatic and manual:

Automatic placements

Automatic placements enable Facebook  to get the best results available from across all default placements. Because we can choose results from the widest range possible, automatic placements are typically the most efficient use of your budget and helps control costs. We recommend it for most advertisers.

However, you may be confused about why Facebook recommend this if you use the lowest cost bid strategy  and check the average cost per optimization event for each placement in your reports.  For example, if the average cost per optimization event on Facebook Feeds is significantly cheaper than it is on Instagram Stories, you might want to stop placing your ads in Instagram Stories and place more of them in Facebook Feeds.

We can see why you’d consider that, but keep in mind that our delivery system is designed to get you the most optimization events at the lowest average cost overall – not the lowest average cost for each placement. This means we look at all available opportunities across all placements and select the least-expensive ones without regard for what the average cost per optimization event will be for each placement.

Another benefit of automatic placements is that if you decide to duplicate a campaign, any new placements will automatically become available for your duplicated ad.

Example

Here’s a simplified example showing how this works, and why it’s easy to misinterpret:

Say there are 11 opportunities to show your ad: 3 on Facebook, 3 on Instagram and 5 on Audience Network. The Facebook opportunities cost $3 per optimization event. The Instagram opportunities cost $5 per optimization event. 3 Audience Network opportunities cost $1 per optimization event, and 2 cost $7 per optimization event. You have a budget of $27.

If you selected all 3 of these placements, your report would show that Facebook placements have an average cost per optimization event of $3, Instagram placements have an average cost per optimization event of $5 and Audience Network placements have an average cost per optimization event of $1. You’d get 9 optimization events for $27 at an average cost of $3 each.

If you saw these numbers, you might be tempted to turn off the Instagram placement to focus on the seemingly lower-cost Facebook and Audience Network placements. However, here’s what would happen if you turned it off:

Facebook placements would have an average cost per optimization event of $3, there’d be no Instagram placements and Audience Network placements would have an average cost per optimization events of $3.40. You’d only get 8 optimization events for $26 at $3.25 each overall. This is a less efficient spend of your budget.

Facebook optimizes delivery of your ads to get you the lowest overall cost per optimization event.  Facebook does this optimization in the context of the full range of opportunities available. In other words, what you can’t see on your FB reports is the more expensive results you didn’t have to take because of the additional placements. The most important thing to remember is that one placement’s average cost per optimization event being higher than another’s doesn’t necessarily mean it’s inefficient.

HomePage Recommended Placement (Manual Placement)

If you don’t want to enable automatic placements, you can choose which placements you want to use in the “Placements” section of ad set creation. We still recommend using multiple placements to give our delivery system more flexibility.

We recommend the following choices, broken out by campaign objective:

• Brand awareness (including Reach & Frequency buying ): Facebook and Instagram
• Engagement (including Reach & Frequency buying ): Facebook and Instagram
• Video views (including Reach & Frequency buying ): Facebook, Instagram and Audience Network
• App installs: Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and Audience Network
• Traffic (for website clicks and app engagement):Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and Audience Network
• Catalog sales: Facebook and Audience Network
• Conversions: Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and Audience Network. The offsite conversions optimization goal also supports Instant Articles and Instagram Stories.

If you’re emphasizing larger-scale business goals, you may want to choose these placements:

• Extending your campaign: Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and Audience Network
• Daily Unique Reach: Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and Audience Network
• Efficient Reach: Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and Audience Network
• Cross-platform Reach & Frequency: Facebook, Instagram and Messenger
• Additional Message Frequency: Facebook, Instagram and Messenger