A DEEP DIVE INTO FACEBOOK PLACEMENTS.

In this article, we will cover an often overlooked area. I want to start off by defining the word placement.

Placement: The action of putting someone or something in a particular place or the fact of being placed.

Facebook is often considered to be just Facebook, this blue icon on everyone’s smartphone. Well, I know the truth. They are way more than that. And the Facebook Placements option, inside the Ad Set level, has given us access to different platforms where we can: place our ads, follow people around, do retargeting, find an audience and bring people into our funnels and channels. That’s an incredible amount of people within our reach inside one single platform.

ABOUT PLACEMENTS:

When you create your ads, you have the option of letting Facebook show your ads in places where they’re likely to perform best, or manually choosing where you show your ads. The places where you run your ads are called “placements”.

Depending on the objective you choose when you create your ad, your ads can appear in places on and off Facebook.

People spend a lot of their time on Facebook. But they are also engaging on Instagram, Messenger and other apps and sites. Placements help you reach more of the people you care about in the other places where they’re spending their time. This can be cost effective, because our delivery system works best with many options.

You now have the ability to optimize your creative for the different placements on the Facebook family of apps. What advertisers forget sometimes is that these placements are ALL quite different.

These are the placements available to you:

FACEBOOK:

Feeds

Your ads appear in the desktop News Feed (for people accessing the Facebook website on their laptops or desktop computers) and/or the mobile News Feed (for people using the Facebook app on mobile devices or accessing the Facebook website through a mobile browser).

Right Column

Your ads appear in the right-side columns across Facebook. Right column ads only appear to people browsing Facebook on their computer.

Instant Articles

Your ads appear in Instant Articles within the Facebook mobile app and Messenger. Learn more about Instant Articles.

In-Stream Video

Your ads appear as short videos in both Live video and Video on Demand on Facebook.

Suggested Videos

Your ads appear between suggested videos on Facebook. People see suggested videos when they interact with a video in the Feed.

Marketplace

Your ads appear in the Marketplace homepage or when someone browses Marketplace in the Facebook app on their phone.

INSTAGRAM:

Feeds

Your ads appear in the desktop Feed (for people accessing the Instagram website on their laptops or desktop computers) as well as your Feed on mobile (for people using the Instagram app on mobile devices or accessing the Instagram website through a mobile browser).

Stories

Your ads appear in people’s stories on Instagram. Ads in stories only appear to people browsing stories on Instagram.

 MESSENGER:

Home – Your ads appear in the Home tab of Messenger.

Sponsored Messages  – Your ads appear as messages that are delivered directly to a person when they have an existing conversation with you in Messenger.

AUDIENCE NETWORK:

Your ads appear on apps and websites in the Audience Network. With Audience Network, you can extend your ads beyond Facebook to reach your audiences on mobile apps and websites, desktop websites and connected TV apps.

Video ads can also be shown as rewarded videos (where you show full-screen videos to people who choose to watch them in exchange for a reward within an app, such as currency or a special object) or in-stream (to people while they’re watching videos on websites and apps off Facebook).

As you can see, there is a WORLD of options. So when someone tells me they’ve tried everything I simply cringe! Some of these placements are quite different one to the other, as you go through this course you will get more and more ninja and be able to use them to take advantage of the biggest opportunities in existence.

Sometimes, when there’s new placements, like the Facebook Marketplace which was just launched in 2016, I jump all over it because there’s less advertisers on it, meaning the laws of supply and demand work in my favor.

On any given day, you can have campaigns exclusively for Instagram, or exclusively for the Facebook newsfeed. You can test out the powerful Messenger Home in combination with Facebook newsfeed. You can try the new Connected TV placement (Ads inside apps like A&E) in the Apple TV’s, Chromecast or Amazon Fire TV and more! Basically, you are limited only by your imagination. It’s all about testing. Once you find the best performing placements you run with them!

FINAL NOTE:

There are 2 options for Placements at the Ad Set level — Automatic and Manual:

Automatic: Facebook optimizes to help you find the best results across all available placements. Not all placements are available to use for all creatives. For example, if you have a video over 60 seconds long then you cannot use the Instagram feeds placement, Instagram story placement, Connected TV placement and a few others. No need to worry, Facebook will warn you and you will simply accept that it won’t run there.

Manual: With this option checked you will have control over your placements. This is great for some strategies, such as exploiting opportunities like the one I mentioned earlier on the new Facebook marketplace placement.

The following is what Facebook has to say regarding this:

“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”

If you pay attention to optimizing your ads for the different placements, you will undoubtedly improve the user’s experience, and in turn, be rewarded with a lower cost of advertising.

In the end, what’s it all about? TESTING! So always keep testing along the way,, and find what works best for your brand.

There you have it.