The best way of getting a good return on investment on your Facebook™ is making sure you serve the right ad to the right persons and in the right place. As the social media network grew and diversified into separate desktop and mobile platforms, the importance of ad placement grew proportionally.
You can get amazing or terrible results depending on where you place your Facebook™ ads. The success of an ad from the point of view of platform depends on several factors:
What type of Facebook™ platform or app your target audience prefers
The purpose of your ad campaign
The rise of ad blocking software both for desktop and mobile
Ad Placement Must Not Be a Game of Trial and Error
Ad spending is on the rise on the social media – but especially on Facebook™. Companies need to increase their bids and the frequency of their campaigns in order to make sure that they reach the right people and maintain a healthy traffic and sales funnel.
This is why you cannot afford to make experiments from the point of view of ad placement. But you are not alone in your entrepreneurial and marketing efforts. We are here to support you and share with you the latest trends in social media marketing.
Today, we will show you how to choose the ad placement on Facebook™ according to the latest best practices:
1. Let Your Prospects Make the Selection for You
The simplest way to determine the best placement for your Facebook™ ads is to study how your preferred audience interacts with them. For this specific strategy, you should start by setting an ad budget for a relevant period of time – a week is quite enough.
When you have to select the ad placement, select the Automatic placement option. Facebook™ will serve the ads to your selected audience in the places where the ads are most likely to perform well.
Automatic placement means that your ads may be displayed on:
The main Facebook™ platform
Instagram
Messenger
Audience Network
Start monitoring how your ads perform according to their placement. To do so, you go to Ads Manager and select the Breakdown tab. In the drop-down menu, you select Placement & Device. You will get a detailed list containing:
The platform: Facebook™, Instagram, etc.
The precise placement: News Feed, Instant Article, Messenger Home
Type of device: mobile or desktop
Device model: iPhone, Android smartphone, tablet.
Looking over this list you will have a clear view of what type of placement offers the best performance. From now on, you can use this specific placement as your primary ad placement for Facebook™ ads.
2. Choose Your Placement Depending on the Objectives
For each ad objective there are top performing placements and less desirable placements. After many trials and errors made by other marketers, we managed to synthesize the following results.
For brand awareness:
Facebook™ main platform
Instagram
For app installs:
Facebook™
Instagram
Audience Network
Instant Articles
For conversions:
Facebook™
Audience Network
Instant Articles
Messenger
For traffic (web clicks and app engagement):
Facebook
Messenger
Instant Articles
Audience Network
3. Optimising Ad Placement per CPC
If your preferred bidding option is cost per click (CPC), you should know how much each click costs depending on the platform, placement and device. This will help you find a combination of ad placements that offers you the best return on investment.
The statistical data collected by Hootsuite indicated the following costs per click:
Instagram has the highest CPC, varying between $0.60 and $0.70;
Audience Network has the lowest CPC, varying between $0.05 and $0.10
Facebook™ desktop newsfeed CPC varies between $0.28 and $0.32
Facebook™ right column CPC has the greatest variation, between $0.29 and $0.37
The mobile newsfeed maintains an affordable CPC between $0.05 and $0.10.