Which Facebook Ads Placement Strategy Should You Use?

0:00Not all meta advertisers know this, but you can choose which placement, which locations in Facebook and Instagram your ads appear in. And some placements produce much better results than others. So, in this video, I'm going to show you my meta ads placement strategy and explain which placements you want to use, which placements you want to avoid, and when. So, to demonstrate this, I'm in an example ad account. I'm in Ads

0:20Manager, and I'm at the campaign level. And I'm going to go ahead and create a an example campaign, example sales campaign in this instance to demonstrate this. But I'll also talk through how your placement strategy would want to be adjusted depending on what type of campaign, what objective um you are using. Now, placements are selected at the adset level. And if we jump to the adset and scroll down, you can see we've

0:40got this placement section down here. Now, in the the Facebook and Instagram ad world, placements and changing the placement options and being really um specific and intentional around placements and where your ads will appear, Facebook, Instagram, now other locations as well, of course, uh used to be a really big thing and it was a way that people could gain a competitive advantage. It's become less and less of a talking point within the meta ads world, partly because Meta has made it more difficult and less obvious that us advertisers still do have control over this. So you have to come down to placements and you can see that we've

1:14just got this this look here where we've got advantage plus on uh will automatically show ads in the places where people are likely to respond but you can click on this show more settings and when you come into here you can see the various options okay so sort of two components to placements like I said the the locations where your ads can appear Facebook Instagram and other first we've got platforms so if we go ahead and click edit on this we've currently got five platforms Facebook Instagram which is going to be 90 plus percent most likely Well, depending on your campaign objective, I'll talk more about that in

1:44a minute. But most of your ad impressions, where your ads are actually shown, are going to be Facebook and Instagram. We've also got audience network. A lot of advertisers aren't familiar with what that is, but if you click on a link to an app or an article off of uh Facebook and Instagram, often that will be an audience network eligible um placement. Uh we've got Messenger and then we've got recently added threads. Okay, so those are the the sort of five main platforms. You can just go ahead and fully deselect one of those should you wish to. I don't want to advertise on Facebook for example,

2:13just want to focus on Instagram. That is something you can go and do. Uh you can leave them all running. Uh and that's sort of the first stage. Like I said, I'll talk about the the options in a minute. But then we've got this placement controls down below. And here we can get more specific. So you might be happy running on all platforms or only want to select certain platforms, but for some reason you don't want to advertise on stories and reels. You want to advertise on feeds and other locations, right? So the the different placement options, I'm sure you're familiar with what these look like when

2:40they show up to the actual user. And you can see we've got examples over here on the right hand side in the preview depending on what we select. You can also dive into these and get really specific within feed. So you say like look, I'm happy to advertise on the Instagram feed but not the Facebook feed or vice versa. And you can deselect or choose to only advertise on on specific options here. Okay. Now once advertisers realize they have control over this, they can control the places their ads are seen on Facebook, Instagram, and the other platforms that make up uh Met Ads, what they'll often do then is have a

3:10look at their data because you can see results by placement option and you might be able to work out, aha, these placements are performing much better for me, these ones are performing worse, and adjust accordingly. So I'm in an example campaign here um that we've run. It's got 492 website schedules, which is what it's optimizing for. If I go ahead and select breakdown and find placement, mine's in recently used, yours might be further down. Um, but either way, you can search for it and find placement. If I click on that, we can see where these website schedules have come from from a placement standpoint. So, here, for

3:40example, 36 results have come from Facebook reels in app. If I scroll down, we've got Facebook feed in app 137, Facebook feed desktop. So, you can see it also by by device that's sort of broken down into different placements. Uh, 19. We scroll down, what's another one? Instagram feed in at 105. Uh Instagram reels 109. Instagram story 73. So no surprises to me that the Facebook feeds uh Instagram feeds uh reels and stories is what's doing the heavy lifting. Again, no surprise at all. We can also see it on a cost basis cuz it's one thing being able to see where the results coming from, but if I scroll

4:14over, we've got cost per result here, right? So we can see, you know, that's only one generator. That's an anomaly that we can kind of ignore at £11, but 32 there, 42, 44. Instagram feed looks on the cheaper side at 32, which is great. Uh, what have we got here? So, Facebook feed inapp is fantastic at 25, as is desktop. So, it looks like Facebook feed from a cost standpoint is our best performer of the placement options that have produced um good results. Reals being a little bit more expensive. So, we could then jump back and then go, aha, you know what? The feeds on Facebook is performing best for

4:47us. we can go ahead and deselect other options. That is something that you can do taking a look at your your breakdown data. I'll get back to the video in a second, but first I want to let you know about Particle. Particle is a fantastic tool that takes meta ads targeting from good to exceptional by providing the in-depth market intelligence and competitive insights necessary to truly understand and reach the right audience in 2025 and beyond. With Particle, you can track competitor sales, pricing strategies, and product launches down to the skew level, which means you can identify which strategies are working well for your competitors, understand their target audienc's purchasing

5:17behavior, and uncover untapped market opportunities for your ads. Particle can also help you find new audiences or market segments by revealing top selling trends or product opportunities. Combine that with Particle's granular skew level data, and you'll be able to make more informed decisions about targeting, creative, and overall campaign strategy. Right now, you can get started with Particle for free. No credit card required. Just click the link in the video description below. Now, the big question is, should you actually do this? Should you take a look at your breakdown data and then narrow your placement options to only have your ad

5:46show in the best performing placements? Well, it really depends on the campaign objective you're using and the performance goal. That's a a bit of nuance that a lot of advertisers miss out on. And the strategy you want to use when it comes to your placement very much differs depending on on what you're using. Okay. So, if you're running a sales campaign or a leads campaign, which is typically what I recommend most advertisers use, and you have your performance goal set up, so you are optimizing for sales or for leads because a lot of advertisers aren't. Let

6:15me show you what I'm talking about here. So, there's a sales campaign, right? If I scroll up within this adset, we get to this performance goal section. This here is set to maximize number of conversions. We can change that to maximize value of conversions. Um, either one of those, that's optimizing for sales. And then we've got the conversion event we can see here as purchase. If you've got those things in place, um then then you're all good. You

6:35can treat this as a true sales campaign. The same applies to leads, by the way. So if you're running a leads campaign and then you're optimizing for maximize number of leads, maximize value or the equivalent um and then your conversion event is leads or website schedules or something that actually is someone becoming um a lead, then great. That's a true leads campaign. And my recommendation is different than if you either have a sales or leads campaign

6:56and you're using one of the other goals. maximize number of landing pages views, link clicks, reach, impressions. Because honestly, if you select one of those, it's not really a sales campaign or it's not really a leads campaign. It's going to function more like a traffic campaign if you've got landing page views or link clicks. It's going to function more like an awareness campaign if you're going with uh reach or impressions. Okay? So, if you have a true sales campaign, a true leads campaign with the right performance goal selected, I'm absolutely fine with you going with Meta's default, which is all the placements automatically show ads in the

7:27places people are most likely to respond because Meta is optimizing our campaign for the thing that we want. So, the way this campaign is set up, that's purchase. Um, if it's a leads campaign, that's going to be leads. You can see that it was website schedules in the example campaign I just showed you. That's what Meta was optimizing for for website schedules, the equivalent of a lead uh for our business. And Meta is putting our ads. You can see based on the data by this uh uh breakdown by placement. You can see where we're getting our leads from. It's the best placements typically. It's feeds, it's

7:59reals, it's stories on Facebook and Instagram. Okay? So, Meta is already working that out. If you're optimizing for sales, you're optimizing for leads. Meta is going to work that out. And they're not going to put your ads on lower quality placement options if people are unlikely to convert. However, if you are using a different campaign objective, so let's jump back out here, go to the campaign level, and just bring the campaign objective menu up. If you're using awareness or traffic or engagement, app promotion is kind of a different thing. Very much app specific, we can put that to one side. But if you're using one of these uh top three

8:28options or you've got a leads or sales campaign with what I would consider the wrong performance goal, which means it's operating as if it were an awareness, a traffic or engagement campaign, then it's really important to be more selective with your placement options because Meta's optimization process is very literal. So if you say to Meta, I want as much reach as possible, which you can do through an awareness campaign, then Meta is going to put your ads in front of as many people as

8:50possible. How are they going to do that? Well, they're going to put your ads on the lower quality placement options, things like the audience network. Why? Because they're cheaper. The other advertisers that are running leads and true leads and true sales campaigns to generate leads and sales, well, if not many conversions happen from ads that appear on the audience network, those other advertised ads aren't going to appear there. They're going to put your

9:15ads there because it's less expensive. There's less demand for those placement options. That's how they achieve the objective of lots of reach. If you're on a traffic campaign, likewise, you can get lots of cheap link clicks um from the audience network or from of the some from some of the lower quality placement options. And actually, if you are running say an awareness campaign, traffic campaign, engagement campaign, have a look at your breakdown data. And this would actually be really interesting if you are running different types of campaigns. So, let's say you're running an awareness campaign alongside a sales campaign. have a look at the breakdown data and see okay within this

9:48awareness campaign where are your ads being shown within this uh leads campaign or sales campaign where are your ads being shown and you might see a big difference and that's corresponding to quality because meta is going well there's loads of cheap ad impressions here so we can achieve your objective there's lots of cheap clicks here they might not be quality clicks they might be highly unlikely to convert might be accidental clicks a lot of accidental clicks um on the audience network but meta believes it's achieving your objective if it's doing this it's the reason why the uh objectives are so so important and your performance goal is

10:17so important because the the optimization process is very literal. So if you're using one of these other campaign objectives or if you are have got a performance goal that means your campaign is optimizing like that what would I then recommend you do? So let's jump back to our adset level in our example campaign and scroll down to the

10:34placement section. Uh where are we? Okay, so here I think you want to be very specific. So, what I'd be looking to do is just focus on Facebook and Instagram and remove the other three. Remove audience network in particular is important to remove because there's lots of cheap lowquality impressions to be had there. Typically, uh Messenger and threads are typically going to be a small proportion of your ad impressions anyway. Not that important, but I would remove them. So, we focus in on Facebook and Instagram. And then within that, we get really uh specific. So, if I go ahead and select the the placement options, I want to focus on the best

11:06placements. And you saw going through that campaign that was a leads campaign what that looks like, right? So, we're going to focus in on if I delete these out and then reselect is easier. We're going to focus on the Facebook feed, the Instagram feed. Um, leave the rest of the feeds off. Those are the only ones I want to focus on. Within stories and reels, uh, I'm going to do the same thing. Facebook stories, Instagram stories. Uh, Instagram reels profile is fine. Uh, Facebook reels. I'm going to remove in stream. I'm going to remove search results. app and sites are already removed because we removed the

11:36um audience network and that's what what governs that. Now, of course, there are good quality impressions to be had in some of these other placement options. There's good quality traffic. There's probably people who go on to convert and become leads and sales, but our job is not to get our ads in front of as many

11:51people as possible as meta advertisers. It's to make our budget go as far as possible to get the best possible return on ad spend so that we can reinvest and scale and have a profitable business and do all the things that we're running the ad campaign for in the first place. So, I would rather be really specific and focus just in on feeds, reels, stories on the two big ones being Facebook and Instagram. And you will likely see significantly better results from your awareness, traffic, engagement campaigns if you do that. And like I said previously, Metal really doesn't want us to exclude placement options. Once you

12:22exclude those options, you will see this come up. Allow limited spend to excluded placement. So up to 5% of your budget is spent for each excluded placement when it's likely to improve performance. If you leave this selected, then Meta basically has free reign looking at how many placement options we've excluded to put your ads wherever it wants. So definitely then go ahead and deselect that. You're probably likely to see more warnings pop up in your ad account letters like don't do this. You could get better results. Here we go. You could get better results with Advantage Plus placements for one ad set. If you are running a true leads or true sales

12:50campaign, that's true. If you are not, that is not true. Different strategies for different scenarios. And there's lots of businesses that can't run true lead or true sales campaigns. They're not able to track the actions people take on after they click. Maybe they're using a third party site for uh checkouts or for ticket sales or whatever. Uh and therefore, they have to use other campaign types. There are scenarios where we do use other campaign types. Omnipresent content campaign for

13:11example, we're going to use awareness. So, really important to get very specific uh like I've done here. And that's how you do it. And just a quick reminder that if you want more support from me and my team, we offer both done for you services so we can create, manage, and optimize your meta ad campaigns for you. We also teach people how to get fantastic results with meta ads. So if either of those sound interesting, there are links to both in the video description below. You can click on those, go ahead and book a free call with one of my team members to find out more. Next, I'd recommend you check

13:35out this video where I give you my complete playbook to running meta ads today. One of my most popular videos that I've published recently. Go ahead and give it a watch.