Reach and Frequency as an alternative to auction buying

Buying media on Facebook via the auction is the standard method. However, advertisers familiar with the world of programmatic buying may be more accustomed to buying campaigns with a fixed CPM. Although we recommend buying via the auction for almost any kind of campaign with a KPI beyond reaching a certain number of individuals or hitting a specific number of impressions, Reach and Frequency buying on Facebook does have some benefits over the auction method.

Many advertisers may be unaware of this feature as well, since it is only available in your ad account if you apply for whitelisting. 

Here are some use cases for Reach and Frequency buying, and some basic info, a step-by-step and finally some tips:

Use Cases:

You would like to:

• show content sequentially to individuals. (e.g. users see video 1 first, then video 2 etc)

• have predictability and control over your advert delivery when reaching audiences of more than 200,000 people.

General Info:

• A limit can be set on the frequency at which an ad may be served to any individual, but there is no exact guarantee on the frequency which is actually achieved.
• Campaigns can be bought up to 6 Months in advance of the launch date.

• Facebook’s “Campaign Planner” is a tool designed specifically for planning such campaigns.

• Different versions of campaigns can be planned out in the planner and shared with others. 
• Alternatively, campaign outlines can be built in draft using Facebook’s Power editor, to plan the campaigns. (Drafts are only visible to the person making them in power editor)

Step - By - Step: A simple guide

Here is an adset I made earlier. When making the campaign, the buying option “Reach and Frequency” was chosen instead of auction.

By clicking to edit this adset in power editor, we can proceed to see how buying reach and frequency works….

Here, we can set the budget we would like to spend, and the timeframe of the campaign.

A frequency cap can also be applied (this is not perfect and has no guarantee of the actual frequency achieved in the campaign.)

Updating the predictions will provide 4 graphs on how it expects delivery to pan out over the planned campaign period.

Scrolling a bit further down, we can click on the “edit audience” button.

Here, we can input the target audience using location, demographics, custom audiences etc.

The minimum audience size for such a campaign is 200,000!

Click upload and reserve once all is ready, including the creatives. Your campaign is reserved and will go live when you set the start date. 

Here you can see images of the first and last screens when using Facebook’s new campaign creation tool - whether you use this or the old one, the same options are available -->>

We hope this article was helpful! For Facebook's own content on this subject, click here.