How to choose the best placement for your Facebook ad

If you’ve been running Facebook ads for a while, or have attempted to set up an ad through ads manager you’ll know that there are a number of options to choose from when it comes to your ad placement. If you don’t change anything, the default placements chosen by Facebook will be ALL of the options.

I recommend changing the default options and will explain why.

Firstly, the available options will vary depending on the objective you have chosen for your ads. In this post I’m going to focus on the conversion objective as this is the objective I work with most.

What are your options?

When creating an ad with the conversion objective you have the option to place your ad in the following places:

Facebook:

Newsfeed
Instant articles
In-stream video
Right column
Suggested videos
Marketplace
Stories

Instagram:

Feed
Stories

Audience network:

Native, banner and interstitial
In-stream videos
Rewarded videos

Messenger:

Inbox
Stories
Sponsored messages

As you can see there are so many options to choose from, it can become overwhelming and that’s why a lot of you might leave it on the default option and here’s why I suggest you don’t do that.

Why you shouldn’t leave the ads placement on default:

Each ad placement has different size requirements due to the platform or type of ad
It’s harder to track which ad and ad’s placement performs best
It’s harder to tweak your ads if one of the placements isn’t performing

How to choose the best placement for your Facebook ads:

To be honest, there is never a ‘best’ in Facebook ads. It all comes down to testing and what’s best for my business and target audience might be different for yours. Sometimes it even differs per campaign, so each time I run a new type of ad, I test different placements.

I’ll tell you what works for me at the moment but to find out what works for you, I suggest that you test them based on your objectives.

Here’s what I have been using for my business and some of my clients’ businesses. As a default I use the Facebook newsfeed option and I generally also run tests for Instagram feed and/or Instagram stories.

Based on these 3 options alone you can imagine why you should not run them in the one ad set. Each of these placement options has different requirements in sizing, plus in a Facebook newsfeed ad you could include a URL in your text which wouldn’t work in an Instagram feed ad or story ad.

On occasions I also test right column and instant articles when I run a list building campaign and for ecommerce I usually also test marketplace. In the past I’ve crafted strategies that included messenger ads at some point, but it really depends on my client’s overall strategy and whether it fits in.

As I said before, it’s recommended to test them all and in an ideal world you’d create a different ad set for each different placement or as a minimum for each placement that requires a very different approach and creative. However, we have to be realistic too and if we add more ad sets it means that we’ll be spending more money.

If you’re on a budget I recommend only testing the placements where your ideal client is most likely to see your ad. A safe bet would be their Facebook newsfeed and you could potentially add Instagram to your tests. Focus on one or two at the start and make them work for you. Once you have some return on investment you can start playing with the other placements.