About the delivery system: Placements

In many cases, we recommend running your ads across Meta technologies. This gives our delivery system more flexibility to get you more and better results. We call the different places we can show your ads "placements". You make your placements selection in the "Placements" section of ad set creation.

Note: Depending on your ad type, content and the design of its creative, every placement may not be available. Learn more about which objectives work with which placements.

There are two approaches to using placements, automatic and manual.

Automatic placements enable us to get the best results available from across all default placements. Because we can choose results from the widest range possible, automatic placements are typically the most efficient use of your budget and helps control costs. We recommend it for most advertisers.

However, you may be confused about why we recommend this if you use the highest volume bid strategy and check the average cost per optimisation event for each placement in your reports. For example, if the average cost per optimisation event on Facebook Feeds is significantly cheaper than it is on Instagram Stories, you might want to stop placing your ads in Instagram Stories and place more of them in Facebook Feeds.

We can see why you'd consider that, but bear in mind that our delivery system is designed to get you the most optimisation events at the lowest average cost overall – not the lowest average cost for each placement. This means we look at all available opportunities across all placements and select the least expensive ones without regard for what the average cost per optimisation event will be for each placement.

Another benefit of automatic placements is that if you decide to duplicate a campaign, any new placements will automatically become available for your duplicated ad.

Here's a simplified example showing how this works, and why it's easy to misinterpret:

Let's say there are 11 opportunities to show your ad: 3 on Facebook, 3 on Instagram and 5 on Meta Audience Network. The Facebook opportunities cost USD 3 per optimisation event. The Instagram opportunities cost USD 5 per optimisation event. Three Meta Audience Network opportunities cost USD 1 per optimisation event, and two cost USD 7 per optimisation event. You have a budget of USD 27.

In the charts below:

= an opportunity to get an optimisation event on Facebook

= an opportunity to get an optimisation event on Instagram

= an opportunity to get an optimisation event on Meta Audience Network

A red circle around any of these icons means the ad was shown in that placement and got the optimisation event.

If you selected all three of these placements, your report would show that Facebook placements have an average cost per optimisation event of USD 3, Instagram placements have an average cost per optimisation event of USD 5 and Meta Audience Network placements have an average cost per optimisation event of USD 1. You'd get nine optimisation events for USD 27 at an average cost of USD 3 each.

If you saw these numbers, you might be tempted to turn off the Instagram placement to focus on the seemingly lower-cost Facebook and Meta Audience Network placements. However, here's what would happen if you turned it off:

Facebook placements would have an average cost per optimization event of USD 3, there'd be no Instagram placements and Meta Audience Network placements would have an average cost per optimisation events of USD 3.40. You'd only get eight optimisation events for USD 26 at USD 3.25 each overall. This is a less efficient spend of your budget.

We optimise delivery of your ads to get you the lowest overall cost per optimisation event. We do this optimisation in the context of the full range of opportunities available. In other words, what you can't see on your reports is the more expensive results that you didn't have to take because of the additional placements. The most important thing to remember is that one placement's average cost per optimisation event being higher than another's doesn't necessarily mean it's inefficient.

Selected advertisers can now run app install campaigns using only Meta Audience Network.

Although selecting automatic placements is still the best strategy to drive efficient results in most cases, this new feature enables you to set the exact budget and bid for your campaigns on Meta Audience Network.

You can set this at the ad set level in Ads Manager, under Placements followed by Edit placements.