Choosing the right ad placement for your ads is key to your success.

Facebook provides you with a wealth of options when it comes to serving your ads. Dependent on your message, your ads are going to resonate better on different platforms, and even the device they are being viewed on.

Let's run through the various options...

Mobile News Feed

Display your ads to people, wherever they are. Put your message right into people's hands, by selecting the mobile news feed placement. This places your ad in the Facebook mobile app, right into the news feed of your target audience.

Desktop News Feed

Use desktop placement to place ads in people's news feed when they are browsing Facebook from their pc or Mac. For example, this enables you to reach people when they might be browsing Facebook at work (shhhh!), or perhaps reach people that work from home. Combined with mobile news feed, this can be a great tactic.

Desktop Right Hand Column

Similarly to Desktop News Feed, this enables you to reach people browsing Facebook on their desktop. Except, instead of their news feed, the ad is delivered to the right hand side of the news feed, in the right hand column. Performance of this placement can vary - some e-commerce brands will find that these deliver at great CPA's, others will get very little engagement.

Quite often, right hand side placement can struggle to attain reach, and often sees low click-through rates - at Driftrock, this placement is not so much of a priority for us.

Facebook Audience Network

This placement enables you to reach people with Facebook ads, but off Facebook. As a mobile only placement, ads can appear on third-party websites, apps, video players and in Instant Articles. Publishers that apply to be part of the Audience Network are required to meet certain standards. You can therefore be sure that your ads are appearing on quality sites and apps.

Ads can either appear as banners, interstitials or native ads.

Targeting Facebook Audience Network cannot be run in isolation - you have to also run on Facebook News Feed. It is worth paying close attention to the results you get from Audience Network - if you can see it is failing, then remove it from your targeting.

Instagram

As you may know, Facebook also owns Instagram. As a result, you can place ads directly on the Instagram network, using the exact same audience targeting options that are available on Facebook i.e. custom audiences, lookalikes, interests etc.

It is not a requirement to have an Instagram account in order to advertise on Instagram, however it is advised. Your Instagram handle will display prominently, and will be clickable from the ad. If you are unable to associate an Instagram profile with your ad, then you are instead able to associate a Facebook page with the ad, which in effect acts as a 'ghost' profile.

Key Takeaway

Facebook recommend that when selecting your placements, you select ALL targeting options in your adsets. Not only for easy of use and simplicity, but also because, their theory is that they will optimise your ads to the placement that gives you the most cost effective conversions for your chosen objective.

However, at Driftrock, we strongly recommend testing this, versus testing all separated placements. You may find that there is one individual placement that converts far better. As with all elements of your Facebook advertising - test, test, test.