Facebook ads currently have the opportunity to run across 14 placements, including Facebook feeds, Instagram, Messenger and Audience Network.
You may have noticed that during ad creation, Facebook defaults your ad placement selection to Automatic, which they also recommend. Why? Well, Facebook suggests that “Automatic placement enables us to get the best results available from across all default placements. Because we can choose results from the widest range possible, automatic placement is typically the most efficient use of your budget and helps control costs.”
For years there’s been an ongoing debate about how worthwhile running your ads on automatic placements will be for your campaign. Some have found that Facebook prioritises spend to the Audience Network, while others find that it does exactly what Facebook suggests. Here we discuss three reasons you might want to use placement optimisation to improve your campaign performance.
Why You Might Let Facebook Optimise Placements For You
Audience Expansion – If audience size is a big problem for your campaign, particularly at the remarketing stages, you might choose to use automatic placements in order to let Facebook expand the audience size across Facebook’s network.
Ad Frequency Fix – I’ve had multiple problems with high ad frequencies in the past, particularly in dynamic remarketing campaigns due to small audience sizes, one suggestion Facebook gave me to try and improve overall ad frequencies was to switch our ad sets over to automatic placements. One client that I tried this nifty tactic on saw ad frequencies drop by 30.6% month-on-month.
Placement Testing – Despite fears of wasted spend on the Audience Network or your ads being featured in desktop right column, Facebook’s placement optimisation can be of an advantage to your business. One method we might use for testing placements across Facebook for our clients is to implement automatic placements for up to 3 months in order to identify which placements are generating the lowest CPA in order to then target these placements more aggressively.
