Inside Power Editor - Ad Placements

Inside Power Editor - Ad Placements

You want your ad to run everywhere --- newsfeed, right hand column, mobile, desktop, Instagram, audience network. The more places the better, right? 

Wrong. 

Before I start running Facebook ads for clients I do a short review of their current campaigns and one of the things that ALWAYS pops out is where they are running their ads. It’s the section in the Ad Set Level called “Placements”. Facebook defaults this placement to “Automatic placements” meaning that they will automatically run your Facebook ad in the following places:

Newsfeed
Right Hand Column
Instagram
Audience Network

And do you know what this means? It means that you’re probably spending your ad budget on placements that don’t convert well. 

Feeds: This is the news feed. You DO want your ad to run in the newsfeed, so keep that one checked. 

Right Column:  Right hand column (see image below) is something that you may want to test, but in my experience placing an ad here works best when you are sending ads to warm traffic (i.e. people who ‘know’ you). Again, it might be a placement to test if you are running an ad to a cold audience. After a few days you'll be able to determine if it's converting well or not. (

Instagram: Facebook now owns Instagram so you can run ads right from Ads Manager or Power Editor to Instagram, but I would suggest that if you do want to advertise on Instagram you create a new Ad Set so it’s separate from your Facebook ad. This ensures that the image size is set for Instagram.

Audience Network: This is for app developers and allows you to run ads outside of Facebook into apps and games. Most advertisers will not need this placement. 

When you are in the Ad Set level of your campaign in Ads Manager or Power Editor, this is what you’ll see. It will default to Automatic Placements and even though it says “Recommended” I don’t recommend it. Click on Edit Placements and then click on the small arrow next to the word Platform. A drop down will appear where you can deselect Right Column, Instagram and Audience Network. 

In addition, you can click on the arrow after “All Devices” where you can select (or deselect) what devices you want your ad to run. The options are mobile, desktop or both.  I do suggest you run one ad set with the ad going to Mobile and one ad set going to desktop instead of lumping them together. This gives you great data on what devices perform best so you can stop the ones that aren't performing well.

Want to learn more about Facebook Marketing and Ads? Hop over to my Facebook Classroom!