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One of the best features of Facebook advertising is its wide ad placement options which let advertisers choose the best area where they think their ads will perform best. Aside from having more freedom to execute creative ideas, this also gives advertisers better understanding on what type of ads work best for their audience.
When setting up your ad set, you will be presented with two ways to place your ads:
- Automatic Placement – you’re giving Facebook the control to choose the placements where they think your ads will perform based on your campaign objective and creative.
- Edit Placement – You’re going to select where your ads will appear manually.
While Facebook claims that choosing the automatic placement can give you the “lowest average cost overall,” it is still best to manually choose your placements if you have previous data on where your campaigns performed well. After all, there’s no one else who knows the performance of your ads better than you.
You also have to remember that not all facebook ad placements support every type of ad. The infographic below will guide you on the advantages of every type of Facebook ad placement and the ad types that they support.
Facebook desktop news feed
Audiences don’t like being disturbed from their online activities including Facebook browsing. Placing your ad on the desktop news feed reduces the intrusiveness of your ads since they appear with the posts of your audience’s Facebook friends and pages they like. This can also help you cope with the steady decline of organic reach and Facebook’s latest algorithm change that will prioritize posts from friends.
Due to this change, advertising on the desktop news feed will be more important if you want your audience to see your posts.
Note that this is applicable if you are targeting desktop or laptop users.
This placement is ideal for most campaign objectives, especially if your site is not yet mobile-friendly or your goal requires multiple steps or actions like filling up forms to download and install programs.
Ads displayed on desktop news feed normally have 2-4 times higher cost per click than mobile news feed, and ten times than the audience network because of its reach.
Facebook mobile news feed
If you are targeting mobile users but want to achieve the same effect as the previous placement, you can use Facebook mobile news feed.
This will show your ads to over 1.23 billion users accessing Facebook through the app or mobile browsers. Ads appearing on this placement maximize the screen of any mobile device since there are no sidebars making them more noticeable.
Most advertisers include this placement in their campaigns since all 12 ad objectives are supported.
The CPC for this placement is much lower than the desktop news feed but higher than the right column.
Facebook right column
For advertisers who want to make their ads look like ads, you can utilize the Facebook right column. It is the right-hand sidebar of the Facebook desktop news feed
It displays a condensed version of the ads making it the least intrusive among all the placements despite being semi-permanently displayed. This placement is ideal for retargeting campaigns along with desktop news feed
CPC is usually lower as compared to desktop and mobile news feed. But due to the lack of call to action, expect your CTR to be lower.
Audience Network
The audience network is a network of Facebook’s affiliate apps and websites that can be accessed through mobile. Placing ads on the network extends the reach of advertisers to 16% more people (1 billion) than advertising on Facebook alone.
Among the network are some of the biggest publishers like Washington Post, Univision, Daily Mirror, and more than 40% of the top 500 apps.
There are three ad types supported by this placement: native, interstitial, and banner.
There are also three possible results once an ad displayed on this placement is clicked based on the ad objective:
- The ad will open a link in a new browser window
- The ad will prompt the person to install an app
- The ad will launch an existing app on their mobile device
Ads on the audience network have 4x lower CPC than mobile news feed due to the lower CTR.
Instant Articles
Unlike the audience network, ads on instant articles are displayed on articles that can be easily loaded on Facebook. Ads are usually sandwiched in between paragraphs of the article. This is ideal if you are targeting audiences who frequently read longer content that are not available on the news feed.
For advertisers with highly visual products or services, placing ads on Instagram is a must. The placement is also ideal for new companies, as research showed that 60% of users found new products and services on the platform.
Note that only single image, video, and carousel ad formats are supported by Instagram. The most successful types of businesses on Instagram are those that fall under the categories of fitness, beauty, fashion, travel, and art.
Messenger
Messenger ads are the most recent Facebook ad placement that support the messages objective. Advertisers can choose three ways to connect with audiences:
- Messenger destination – lets advertisers create news feed ads that will drive audiences to a Facebook messenger conversation.
- Messenger home placement – displays your ad on the main screen of the messenger
- Sponsored messages placement – displays your message within a message exchange of a messenger friend as long as that user messaged your page before
Since that this placement is fairly recent, expect to see a lot of changes within the year especially involving messenger bots. This is ideal for companies who want to explain their offer, directly communicate with their audiences, convince them to try another product, or remind them to revisit your store. Having a shorter feedback loop gives advertisers endless possibilities on applications.
Running your campaign on multiple facebook advertising placements can give you the best results. However, as mentioned earlier, you may find that some placements don’t work or work well for you depending on your objective or creative, so you have to constantly test, analyze, and record the results. Aside from placements continuously run A/B tests for your offer, copy, visual, and CTA to maximize your Facebook ROI.
