NEW Facebook Ads Strategy for CHEAP ADS!

0:00Did you know there is a completely different way to run Facebook ad campaigns? What? What? What? Meta has just released a new reservation feature, and in this video I'm going to show you exactly how it works and explain whether you should or shouldn't use it. Whoa. So, to demonstrate this new feature and the new way of running Facebook ads that comes along with this feature, I'm in an example Facebook ad account. I'm in Ads Manager, and I'm going to go ahead and

0:22click on the green plus create button. Now, one setting that people nearly always skip past, they don't think to even check it, is before you even get to the campaign objective section, it's this buying type. Now, the default is set to auction, but if you click on this little drop down, you will now see an

0:37option beneath it called reservation. Now, this replaced what used to be called reach and frequency, and to quickly explain how this works. So, auction is the default, and that means that the price that you pay for your Facebook and Instagram ads to be put in front of people is set by an auction. It's determined by how many other advertisers want to reach those same people. It's why your CPMs, your cost per thousand impressions, a good sort of measuring stick for how expensive Facebook and Instagram ads are, why that metric will spike, will go really high around Black Friday because there are more advertisers wanting to spend more

1:06money. And that's what happens within an auction. If there's less advertisers, you pay less. If there's more advertisers, you pay more. Reservation, the second option here, operates quite differently. It allows you to reserve a price, so you're not just at the whim of the auction and how it changes and all that sort of stuff. You can reserve a

1:22price, usually a much, much lower price. The advantages there to Facebook advertisers are pretty obvious, and let's walk through it and go through the steps, and I'll talk a bit more later on about whether you should use or shouldn't use it and what scenarios and all that sort of stuff. So, first thing if we go ahead and select reservation that you'll see is that it massively

1:37changes the campaign objective options. We can't use sales, we can't use leads, we can't use things like that. We're restricted to um awareness engagement here, and traffic is is grayed out. But I'm going to go ahead and select awareness as we go through. Now, those of you who've been following my content for a while would know that I'm a big fan of sales campaigns and lead campaigns, and it's a shame that you can't use those campaign objective options with this buying type, but we do use awareness um from time to time, so it's not that we would never use this because of those campaign objective restrictions, and I'll explain

2:04more about that later on as I've already said. But let's move on and let's go through the the setup and and how this all works, right? So, obviously the campaign level is going to look very, very similar to a regular campaign. Nothing really to worry about here. Special ad category, select it if it applies just like with a an auction campaign, but what I want to do now is jump over to the ad set level where things start to get significantly different from what we would see with an auction campaign, okay? So, obviously we've got page and Instagram account, make sure you've got the the right one

2:30selected. Um if you've got multiple with your ad account, we've got schedule just as you would see elsewhere. Then we get into this location section. Now, it looks very similar, this location section, to an audience campaign. If we click into edit audience, we can start to play around with the various features. And in the location targeting section, you can edit things and adjust things just as you can with an auction campaign. So, you can narrow down your age criteria, you could narrow down your gender criteria, or you could select more specific locations within a a country or select multiple countries depending on where your business delivers its product services and and

3:01things like that, okay? Now, with the reservation buying type, typically you want to be using this for broader audiences. It's usually used for more of a a mass market approach as opposed to something really specific, but if your business is really specific and you want to give this a go, by all means test it out. I'm a big fan of testing when any ever it comes to anything Meta-related, particularly new features like the reservation buying type that people may not have used before. Definitely give it a go and see how it performs. And if you do test this with a more specific targeting set, um and it works really

3:28well, let me know. I'd be really curious to to hear about that. What I'm going to do for the demonstration purposes of this video is just leave it at the default United Kingdom, everyone, um assuming we're going for a fairly broad targeting option. Of course, we can um include detailed targeting options, we can include um custom audiences and lookalike audiences, we can do all the stuff that we would usually do. But that's not the really interesting part about reservation buying types cuz that's pretty similar to the other stuff. Then we get into ad formats. Now, this is interesting, and this is not something you'll be used to seeing. The

3:56default selected here is image or carousel, but we can add the other types of ad format that we want to use depending on what creative assets you have. So, particularly when you're just getting started with this, if you're having a play, don't overthink this. Just select the ones that apply, right? If you're just going to use images, great. Just go ahead and select this option. If you want to add videos in as well, go ahead and add those in. Just depend on what what creative assets that you you have to play with. Then we get down to the placement section. Now, this part is really, really interesting. For

4:21the first, and I think only place within Meta nowadays, that you will see manual placements as the default selection, not Advantage+ placements. Meta is really pushing most advertisers to go with Advantage+ placements, and if you see my previous videos on the topic, I like doing that if you are using a conversion-based objective, things like sales, leads, etc. But of course, because we're using um awareness or engagement in this circumstance cuz those are the the objectives that we're left with once we change our buying type, um you do want to be more specific with your placement options, and it almost looks like um Meta is either listening to me or they've worked this

4:54out themselves, I'm sure it's the latter, and they've default selected manual placements. I would go a little bit further than what they've done here and deselect the Audience Network. Audience Network is typically lower quality um impressions. You're not going to get the follow-through on actions if people click on your ads as you will with, say, the feed, stories, um main things on on Facebook and Instagram. And that's really important when you aren't actually optimizing for a purchase or a lead, and Meta can can make sure your ads are only put in the places where those things are most likely. Here, we're optimizing for things like awareness, engagement, so there might be

5:27places where you can get a lot of awareness, you can just get your ads in front of a lot of people, like the Audience Network, relatively inexpensively, but is that going to be the best quality impression? Is that going to mean a lot to your business? I would suggest it probably isn't. Therefore, we're going to deselect the Audience Network. If you really want to,

5:42you can come in and get more specific. If you're like, "Look, I only want to display my stuff on the Instagram feeds, or I only want to display my stuff across stories on both platforms." And you can obviously come in and deselect. I think for most people, going with the setup that I've got here of Facebook and Instagram and then the ones that are that are left available, I think that's pretty good. Then as we continue to scroll down and get past the the placement sections, and there's obviously some extra information and criteria that they're giving you in here, which devices you want to operate on, the the regular stuff. We get into

6:09this brand safety and suitability. Now, there are other places within Ads Manager where you might see this um pop up, but um most of the time you won't, and most advertisers won't be familiar with this, so it's worth quickly explaining. Now, this only applies to certain placement options, so we've got three listed here. You see, it only applies to um Facebook in-stream videos, ads on Facebook Reels, and ads on Instagram Reels. And what we're basically able is select um where we're happy for our ads to be shown. So, the default option here is moderate inventory, which is exclude moderately sensitive content. We could go with expanded, show ads on all content that

6:43adheres to our content monetization policies, so you get the most reach, or we could be much more limited. And this is really um what do you want your ads to be shown alongside? Are you happy for your ads to be shown alongside basically anything, and you you're not concerned that it might make your brand look bad if your ads are shown alongside content that perhaps you know, doesn't fit your

7:01company values or or things like that. Um you can be much more limited if you want it that way, or maybe you're just happy for it to be open, you can go with expanded, or you can just go with the default, which most people do, moderate inventory. So, just have a little think about that. It's okay, what are my ads going to be displayed alongside? How does that impact my brand? How does that impact the likelihood of people taking actions? Obviously, your lowest costs are going to come from expanded inventory, moderate's going to be middle, and you're going to end up paying more for limited inventory cuz

7:24you're limiting options, but that's just something to to be aware of, and something I wanted to highlight in case you're not familiar with this. And then of course, you could get more specific with things like block lists of, "No, I don't want my ads to show up alongside anything like this." And there's all sorts of options. I will make a separate video on that, by the way, cuz I think

7:38people be quite interested in that. You've also got content type exclusions, so we could exclude all live videos, for example. The other options are grayed out. Not something that most advertisers need to worry about. As I said, I'll create a separate video on block list content type exclusions cuz that's something that's there's not really that pertinent to this video, but but it's something some advertisers will be interested in. Then we get down to optimization and delivery, and of course, we've got performance goal. So, if we go ahead and select the the drop down here. So, we've used the awareness objective, and the objective that you use determines what performance goal

8:05options you have. So, we've got maximize reach of ads, you know, we'll try to show your ads to as many people as possible. That's typically what most people go for with awareness. We could change that to maximize ad recall lift. So, what that is is we'll try to show your ads to people who are likely to remember seeing them. Personally, I'm a little bit skeptical over how well Facebook can assess who is likely to remember and who isn't likely to remember my ads. I mean, I'm sure they use things like linger time, but I'm a little bit skeptical that they're actually able to work that out. So, I

8:31think it's fine to just go with the default, get the most number of reach, get your ads in front of as many people as possible. It's typically what people want with awareness. Um we've got video view goals as well, maximize through plays. Again, that will depend what ad format you're using. For most people, I'd still recommend going with reach of ads, but if you find that your video ads, for example, are getting loads and loads of people watching them, but nothing's really happening, maybe you want to switch it to three-play video views where people need to watch the whole thing or 15 seconds, um and that

8:56might be a bit of a better quality interaction to optimize your Facebook and Instagram ad campaigns for. I'm going to leave it as the default. Then we've got a whole bunch of other things that are fixed, things like bid strategy, that's fixed. Delivery type is automatic, explain a bit more about that in a second, and campaign duration is fixed here for for 7 days, so nothing to really worry about that. Then we get into the frequency control. Now, when we run awareness campaigns, frequency caps um is a big part of that. We only want to make sure that certain people see our ads a maximum number of times cuz we

9:24want to spread the impressions out over a lot of people. We don't want the same people to be hit over and over and over again with the same ads, which is more likely to happen with a sales campaign or a leads campaign to try and get that person to take a a larger action than just being aware of whatever it is that you're advertising. Um so, so that could typically happen, and we could we can

9:41change that with with frequency control. Now, interestingly, Meta have recently introduced this target setup here. So, it's the average number of times you want people to see your ads in a week. Um so, what's that showing is that sometimes some people will be shown your ads more than your frequency cap um with this option or you can just change it to cap and say, "No, I never want anyone to

10:02see my ad more than than once per week." I think going with the target is actually fine. I think there are scenarios in which it actually makes sense for people to maybe see it a little bit more often and Meta's systems are pretty smart at working that sort of stuff out. I personally feel like it's not a big deal either way, whether it's target or cap, it's likely to the

10:19delivery's likely to be pretty similar. If you're like, "No, I want to get the absolute maximum reach possible." then by all means go with cap, but I'm going to leave it as target cuz I don't think that's a big deal. And then in terms of the time frames, you could just adjust this depending on what your budget objectives are. Like more creative,

10:31you're going to want to adjust this. Less creative, you won't want to adjust this. Um, for most people you can absolutely fine to go with the default of once every 7 days. That's the time period during which this campaign's going to run and anyway. So if we really want to get as many eyeballs as possible, then then that's going to help us set that up. Then we get down to this delivery scheduling preference, which I actually think is a really interesting feature. You can see it's all grayed out, because it's telling us we need to upload ads before we can go ahead and and choose this, but I can show you how

10:55to do that in a minute. Um, but what I want to if I just quickly delete that, what I want to quickly talk about are the two options. So we've got delivery scheduling preference as standard and you can see that says find and deliver the best performing ads or we've got sequenced. So that's set a sequence to deliver several ads to the same audience in a certain order. Now this could be really big for the omnipresent content campaign, for those people who are familiar. If you're not familiar, I'll include a link in the video description and that shows you exactly how to set up a campaign like that. But often there

11:21are times where you don't want to just put a bunch of ads into an ad set and let Meta work it out and deliver the best performing ads, which is what you get with standard. Sometimes you actually go, "No, I would like my prospects to see ad A on Monday, ad B on Tuesday, ad C on Wednesday." Perhaps you've got a limited time promotion and on Monday you want to be saying, "Only 3 days left to buy our thing at the discounted price." and then on Tuesday you want to say, "Only 2 days left to buy our discounted thing at the at the price." and then on Wednesday it's 1 day

11:48left and on Thursday it's last day. So there there are times like that where you'd want to use sequence ads and that might be a good use case scenario. Likewise in omnipresent content, you want to make sure that on day one they get a value ad, on day two they get a a demonstration ad, on day three they get a call to action ad and and and round and round it goes, okay? So there's lots of different ways that you can you can

12:05you might want to use that sequencing. So don't um, ignore that feature if that's important to your business. I know there's a lot of businesses when they are using the reservation buying type aren't doing so when they've got a limited time promotion. They really want to get the message out there fast and and and powerfully, that sequence might be a really good way of doing it if you've got ads set up that way. So hopefully you can have a little think about that and how that applies to your business. Now I want to head over here on the right-hand side and scroll up to this um, reservation estimate section

12:33because I think this is probably the most interesting thing about the reservation buying type and where it really starts to differ. Now this is an example Facebook ad account. If I create a regular auction campaign, the default budget that Facebook will give me for a an ad set, let's say, will be 20 pounds per day. The default budget that Meta's gone and and popped in here is 8,330 pounds um, for the 7-day period. And what I think Meta is trying to tell us is that with this buying type reservation, it's typically used for businesses that have larger budgets, bigger brands, they're looking to get a ton of awareness or a ton of engagement

13:08as opposed to smaller businesses that operate with smaller budgets that specifically trying to generate leads and sales in the shorter term. Now of course we can change this, but if for example I go ahead and drop that to 100 pounds, you will see that Meta has a little go at me saying that you need to spend enough to reach at least 200,000 people. So over the 7 days it's calculated that's going to be 120 120 pounds is the minimum budget I could use. So it's still a lot lot less than the default of course, but I can um, go ahead and adjust this. You just need to

13:34make sure you reach a minimum of 200. So I'll just get rid of that to um, to make sure that Meta's happy with me putting in 1,000 pounds, let's say. And then we say reach is going to be around a million people. Estimated audience size, we're just targeting the whole of the UK, so that's fairly self-explanatory. Frequency is a one, but of course we've set that at the frequency cap. I could go ahead and change this to a two or whatever and that's going to to change this this frequency number. But the really crazy thing about the reservation buying type is the CPM. These are estimates, but

14:01these estimates here are much much much more accurate than the estimates that you'll get through the auction campaigns and I get comments all the time people saying, "Facebook's telling me I might get zero sales or I might get zero leads or uh, my campaign not might not perform very well. Should I still go ahead and run it?" And I say, "Ignore these estimates. Go ahead and do it." With the reservation uh, buying type, the estimates are much more important and much more accurate because you're actually reserving those prices. You're booking those in as opposed to just guessing ahead of time. So when you see something like a CPM of 96 pence, 0.96

14:32pounds, that is relatively accurate. It's going to be close to that when you actually run this campaign. And crazy, that CPM, that cost per 1,000 impressions, is so much lower than what you would see in an auction campaign. We could run an auction campaign in the UK and see 40 pound CPMs, 50 pound CPMs. We might see 15 pound CPMs. It's going to depend on who we're advertising, what industry we're operating in, but a CPM of less than a pound, you will not see in the haven't seen that in the auction

14:59since like 2014. Basically a decade ago. Um, it's just not not been possible. So that's um, that's something to really be aware of and that's obviously that is the big um, selling point, the big advantage of this buying type is that you're able to reach a lot more people for a lot less money, okay? So if we scroll down, we've got some reach per frequency. Because we've just set this to one every 7 days, um, this doesn't really mean anything. But if you change that, you'll be able to see like, okay, the most people getting impressions on first impression on these days and then the second impression might come a few days

15:30later and and you can have a little play around with that. Same, you can see this frequency per person. But this part I really wanted to highlight, which I thought was interesting and this is something that the Meta often does with lifetime budgets and this is a lifetime budget because it's it's over 7 days, is you can see that the ad spend per day is not even. You know, we start off quite strong, it really spikes on day two and then slowly drops off and spends a lot less at the end of the week. Why they do this it it is is interesting. It's it's I've got some theories as to why that

15:56might be the case. They want to guarantee it in so they're not having to do it later on. They feel that you're likely to get better performance if you front load it versus if you do it evenly. Um, but it's just interesting something to be aware of that if you do launch this campaign and you see, "Oh, we're getting tons of engagement, we're getting tons of awareness in the first or second days." and then it really drops well, look at how the spend is going to be um, distributed. Um, that's likely to be why. Then you can have a little look at this placement distribution, which I

16:21also think is is interesting and you can see where um, it's predicted that your ads will actually be shown. I'm not sure there's a huge amount of useful information that you can draw from this um, or edit if you really didn't like something that you saw in here even though we we can't see that much detail, you could go ahead and adjust your placements at the ad set level, but I think we've already set that up in this example the way that I would typically run these campaigns using this buying type. So not too much to look at there,

16:43but just a point of interest, let's say. So the next step is now to go ahead and click on reserve and upload. Um, I'm not going to do that here cuz I don't want to book in this um, campaign at 1,000 pounds when it's not actually got anything in it. It's not a real campaign. It's just a an example campaign to demonstrate this. But just go ahead and click that, select the ads or upload them. It's relatively straightforward. I've got lots of other tutorials covering ad creation. I'll include links in in the video description if you want more more detail on that. Um, but this video is all about

17:08this buying type and this this way of running ad campaigns and this is how you set it up. So now we need to quickly discuss when you do and don't want to use the reservation buying type because the advantages are pretty obvious. Way lower cost, reach more people, doesn't that sound fantastic? But we need to temper that a little bit and and go through certain scenarios. Before I get into that, I just want to quickly let you know about some really exciting news. I've launched a new mentorship program to help you explode your business's revenue and profits through paid ads and marketing. Now in this mentorship program, myself or my team

17:35will mentor you daily, literally every single working day and because of that spots are very limited. So if you're interested, you can click on a link in the video description below and book a call with one of my team members who can explain everything about the mentorship program and how it works. I'm really really excited about this and I hope to be working with you and mentoring you

17:51very soon. Oh my god. Why aren't we all running campaigns like this instead of auction and paying a tiny fraction to reach people of what we would be paying with auction uh, as the buying type for for campaigns? And you might be thinking you'd be able to game the system and get more leads and sales

18:05because you'll reach many more people. In practice it rarely turns out like that. We have run a number of experiments with this and we have actually what one scenario where it did outperform um, sales and lead campaigns across I don't know, probably six or seven different tests so far. So we're going to keep testing because it is interesting. Now we know the power of Meta's machine learning processes and how good they are at getting you exactly

18:25exactly what it is that you want. What do you want? It's not that simple. What It's do you want? want sales, you want purchases or you want leads and you have the tracking set up and Meta knows what that looks like and they've got that data in your ad account, they're so good at going out and getting that for you, putting ads in front of the right people. We don't get to take advantage of that with um, the reservation buying type because we can only use awareness, engagement, etc. Um, but does the massively reduced cost make up for that? In one scenario in our

18:56testing it has, in others it hasn't. Could that be the way forward in the future? I could definitely see us moving more and more towards this setup and there are specific UK use cases where you would want to use it now. So I think if for example you wanted to book in a lower cost, guarantee a lower cost during particularly peak expensive times. I'm thinking around Black Friday being the obvious example, but there are other holidays where you will see a cost spike and this will vary depending on businesses and your seasonality. So maybe you're like, "Actually, for that week or those couple of weeks it'd be

19:23really good just to book in a lower cost. I think that would be net beneficial." then by all means go ahead and do it. If you're a really big business and you're not so much worried about a direct action and you want awareness and you would be running an awareness campaign otherwise, why not take advantage of this? I think if you're going to be running an awareness campaign using the auction buying type, you should absolutely at least be testing the reservation buying type. I wouldn't be surprised if you see better results there. And then of course that leads into the omnipresent content strategy, something that I'm often

19:50talking about that I'm really a big fan of for selling high ticket products and services, we're absolutely in the process right now of testing an reservation for that. Um some encouraging results early on again just because we can reach people for so much um less. So, if you're are using that strategy, go ahead and and give this a go. And to be honest, no matter what strategy you're using, I would recommend that basically every Facebook advertiser that knows how to use this and you do know you've been through this video, give this a test. You can do it with a relatively small budget probably in comparison to what you're spending

20:19elsewhere. And then I definitely think it's worth experimenting with these things cuz you might find the results are better and in which case, what a great experiment to run. If it's not as good for your business, okay, at least you now know and you can you know where to put your focus. Another scenario in which we think the reservation buying type would be really useful is if you're an agency and you're working with clients, particularly um big clients, big brands, they often want to know exactly what they're getting for their money. They want to know well, how many people is this going to be put in front

20:44of and things like that. They're They're less comfortable with well, we're just going to run a campaign and kind of see how it performs and we're going to optimize for sales and leads. They want to know how many people are going to see this on the sort of metrics. With this, you can be more um you can have more predictability. So, I think for a lot of those bigger businesses, whether they're a client or you know, you're directly advertising those, I think this is going to appeal for those reasons. It's more in line with what they're used to in other forms of advertising, particularly offline stuff where they know exactly

21:08what the distribution is for that ad in a a magazine or an email newsletter going out or something along those lines or how many how many people on average watch this TV program, how many people on average listen to this radio show. They get an idea of what their distribution is. This is is more in line with that. So, I think a lot of those bigger businesses are going to appreciate that predictability and use this feature. And if you've got clients that meet that criteria, you may want to use this feature for them as well. So, testing would be my recommendation for this. I do think most businesses are

21:34still going to see better results with the auction buying type if they do want to generate leads and sales, particularly if they need to do so over relatively short time frame, which is going to be most people that that watch my videos. As crazy as that might seem with the difference in CPMs, but I said,

21:47test and see for your business. And if you do want to know exactly how I'd recommend you run regular campaigns using the auction buying type, then I strongly recommend you check out this video. In this video, I'll walk you through the entire Facebook ad campaign creation process using the typical auction buying type. I show you every single little detail that you need to get right to get the best possible

22:05results. Go ahead and check it out.