Facebook Advertising Best Practices: Automatic Placements

When creating advertising campaigns using Facebook Ads Manager, it’s important to understand the different optimizations, settings and features that Facebook offers in order to run efficient and effective ad campaigns. Knowing what to troubleshoot and when can save you time, money and frustration. One of the Facebook optimizations that is often overlooked when creating Facebook advertising campaigns is the “automatic placement” feature.

What is Automatic Placement? Automatic placement is a feature Facebook offers to advertisers who run ads on its family of apps and services. When selected, this service allows Facebook to deliver your ad to the right person, at the right time on the right platform.

When you select the automatic placements feature when creating campaigns, you allow Facebook to serve your ad on Facebook, Instagram, Audience Network and/or Facebook Messenger.

Why should you choose automatic placements? This setting is designed to get your ad the lowest average cost for the event you optimize your campaign for (e.g., link clicks, landing page views, video views). In turn, this takes the guessing work out of where your audience is. Also, the automatic placements feature reduces the time it takes to manually optimize placements, since Facebook does it for you, and extends your ads reach by enabling placement on more platforms and multiple placements within these platforms.

In most situations, using automatic placements is a strategic method in placing ads because it provides more display opportunities and the likelihood of lower cost per outcome is higher. However, there are certain situations where manual placements would be a better fit for your campaign.

One example of when manual placements would be more beneficial could be when running a campaign that was created with Stories in mind. This type of campaign usually involves creative content and additional features that are formatted differently from any other placements. Often Story campaigns wouldn’t make sense to be placed as a Facebook right column ad but would for Facebook and Instagram stories.

To ensure that your campaign is optimized correctly, familiarize yourself with all of Facebook’s offerings and settings for advertisers. Studying Facebook’s Blueprint courses is an excellent resource for understanding automatic placements, as well as all other skills you can use to move your business forward using Facebook Business and Ads Manager. Head to Facebook Business to learn more.

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