Making the Right Choices for Facebook Ad Placements

Many social media marketing managers are faced with the prospect of limited market spend, while also achieving maximum results through their marketing initiatives. That makes it essential to choose the right Facebook ad placements, so that ad performance is optimized and the best possible return is achieved. The different types of Facebook ad placements are described below, along with some tips on how you can choose them to achieve maximum results for your marketing campaign.

Facebook ad placements

There are a total of 15 different areas within Facebook where you can show your ads, and Facebook refers to these as ad placements. When you are planning on advertising in Facebook, you will need to set your placement at the appropriate ad set level associated with your campaign, and then you have to choose a platform where it should appear. Platform selections include Messenger, Audience Network, Instagram, or Facebook itself, and within these platforms, there will be a number of different placement options you can choose from. Some of the most commonly used ad placements are described below.

News feed placement

When you place your ads in the Facebook news feed, they will appear either in the mobile news feed, the desktop news feed, or both. Mobile news feeds of course, will include all those users who access Facebook via a smartphone app or a mobile browser. This is one of Facebook's original options for ad placement, and is also considered to be the most popular option, as well as the most effective one. As you might expect, it's also the most expensive option, primarily due to its overall effectiveness.

Instagram feed placement

With this option, your ads will appear on the desktop feed for users of laptops and desktops computers, and on a mobile feed for those individuals accessing Instagram through a mobile web browser or through the app itself. This option has quickly become the second most effective ad placement option, especially for those whose target audiences are highly active on the Instagram platform. With upwards of one billion active users on a monthly basis, Instagram has become a primary target for ad placement. Social media managers frequently make use of this ad placement option alongside their Facebook feed placement and compare the results of the two.

Facebook marketplace feed placement

Relative to most of the other placement options, Facebook Marketplace is fairly new. When you place your ads in this category, they will appear on the homepage for Marketplace, or when a user browses through the Marketplace on their smartphone Facebook app. Marketplace ads also appear in news feeds, although it is not presently possible for ads to be placed solely in Marketplace. This is one of the best options for e-commerce companies which are aware of the fact that their target audiences are constantly shopping for economical products and local deals. That makes this option less than ideal for service-based businesses or for advertising high-value items.

Facebook watch feed placements

When using this campaign placement, your ads will appear either on the Facebook watch feed or the suggested videos feed. Video is an option commonly used when the goal is to achieve low-cost, high-quality engagement, and to establish a target audience of individuals whom you could then re-market with future ad campaigns. This is one of the ideal options to choose when you have video content to present to audiences in tandem with your Instagram and Facebook feed placements.

Messenger inbox feed placement

When choosing this ad placement option, your ads will appear between conversations on the Facebook Messenger Home tab. This is another relatively new placement option, which means thus far audience response has not been nearly as strong as some of the other feeds placements. One of the reasons this is so, is attributable to the fact that Messenger ads feel much more intrusive to users.The one-on-one nature of text messaging causes pop up ads to seem inappropriate or invasive, compared with news feeds which continuously scroll through content. Whenever users do click on an ad, they will instantly be navigated to a detailed Messenger view which shows the full advertisement, along with a call-to-action button. This button would then direct any user to the link destination you established during the creation of your ad.

Stories feed placements for platforms

You can choose to place your ad in Facebook stories, Instagram stories, or Messenger, and this is quickly becoming an extremely popular option. More than 500 million people make use of this ad placement feature every day, due in large part to the fact that it's one of the more underpriced possibilities. Within your Stories placement, you can choose one of three platforms, those being Messenger, Instagram, and Facebook. The most commonly selected option of these three is Instagram, probably because that's where the feature was first enabled.

How to choose your ad placements

With 15 different options for placing your ads, it might seem like a difficult task to narrow down the best options for you to use. When creating new campaigns via the Guided Creation method, or through Quick Creation workflow, you'll have to choose your ad placements at the level of an ad set. In order to do this, you will have to click on Create Campaign, and then choose what your objective will be from those options displayed on the drop-down list.Then you will have to choose your objective and provide a name for your campaign, for your ad set, and finally for the ad itself. Next, you have to click on Save to Draft, which will create a draft copy of your ad in the Ads Manager. Once you've completed this part of the task, you will automatically be taken to the ad set level by clicking on the name of your campaign. To be sure you're at the ad set level, check for the words Ad Set, which will be featured in blue in the pop-up menu on the left-hand side.Then you'll see your campaigns ad set, and you'll be able to set your audience targeting, budget information, bidding optimization, and your actual placements. By clicking the box next to your ads, the Edit button will appear, and you'll have to click on this. This will take you to the Edit Window, where you'll have to scroll down to the Placement portion.Here you'll see the two options, which are Edit Placements and Automatic Placements. By clicking on Edit Placements, you will then see a list of all 15 possible placement options, with a checkbox next to each. This will allow you to turn on or off any of the placements you want to use in your specific ad set.