Thread by @CTtheDisrupter

Facebook Ads Best Practices 30 Days of 30 🧵 *MEGA THREAD*
Day 28: Optimizing by Placement... is just a TERRIBLE idea

Isolating placements, and other Programmatic Strategies on Facebook, and why you shouldn't ever do it

A Series of 🧵 for #MarketingTwitter

Placement.

So many people are talking about placement and I get it.

Like maybe your ads are doing better on Instagram, or maybe they're doing better on Facebook, or maybe you need to get into the newsfeed or want to try to be smarter than machine.

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Well, let me tell you, you are not smarter than machine.
This is the biggest mistake that so many people make.
Lets get down to understanding why placement is one of the biggest bold lies of all the things you can try to do to try to improve your ad account.

First off, what is placement?

Placement
When you go into Facebook and you do real breakdowns, you can see by placement.
And this is really telling you where your ads being served and what is the result of that spend.

Some just take a look at that & say
"wow, all of my ads are going to Instagram & that's great."

Or maybe you're the type of person that wants to choose only showing your ads to Instagram.

You think of it as Instagram ads and then Facebook ads

Maybe you want to try to really exploit the stories section.

Cause you're seeing really low CPMs.

There there's a million other reasons why you'd maybe want to try to segment out one of these placements.
Now let me tell you something here.
That's really key.

There is a reason why you're getting results by placement right now.
Maybe you're seeing, all of your spend is going to Instagram, but Facebook is super cheap.

Example: $800 is going to Facebook & it's good, but $200 is going to Instagram & it's doing phenomenally.

You might be thinking "well look, all I need to do is just spend it all on Instagram and then I'll be phenomenal."

Honestly, I've seen a lot of people make that mistake.

There's a reason that that Instagram placement is working really well & that's because of the budget and because of the bid and the impact that the budget has on it, as well as the creative.

There's a reason that your ads going to stories
or going to Instagram
or going to Facebook newsfeed
why one ad's spending in one place
and one ad's spending in another place
and that's where you're getting these results

Estimated Action Rate x Inventory x Impression Retargeting

Odds are:
Wherever you're going to be spending the most amount of money tends to not be as good as other places.
We spend a little bit of money.
There might be five or 10 sales for super cheap over here, and a hundred sales over here for slightly more expensive.

When people try to really segment out by placement, what they're doing is ignoring one of the core tenants, one of the true basic fundamentals around the Power 5 & around the best practices for Facebook.
Remember Facebook is not email.
It's not Amazon.
It's not Google.

Facebook is not an inventory or demand based platform
Facebook, that also owns Instagram and controls where your ads go.
Facebook owns both of those environments & their objective is to try to keep somebody on these platforms for as long as possible.

When somebody sees your ad, it might be the first time. It might be the 10th time, but hopefully it's the right time to get them to want to push over into making a sale.

They've probably seen your exact product or service or something very similar from a lot of different advertisers on a lot of different platforms, television, radio search, and sort of newspapers, magazines, blog, articles, whatever Pinterest, Snapchat, Tik TOK.

You're not bringing something new to the table.
So the idea that you want to specialize down to one specific placement because in a very limited budget and a very limited scope, you're able to see that thing do phenomenally better than everything else... is fundamentally flawed.

When you see results out of context, and you try to abuse those results, what we see...
just like when we strive to throw all of our ad spend behind one ad or when we try to isolate just one audience...
is that it stops working really, really fast.

Its not that it stops working
You took something that wasn't broken, something that was great
Something that was really reliable
You took it to the point where it breaks instead of understanding this thing is making everything work because it's a small piece in the overall puzzle

So let me tell you the three biggest mistakes that I see people make.

Mistake #1:
Folks say, "my Instagram numbers are so much better than my Facebook. I'm just going to turn Facebook off."

Now that might work for spending a little bit of money, but as soon as you try to scale or try to really implement something, what do we see?

1. the results fade pretty quick
2. We have this thing that just constantly happens where results were good, but they only lasted for a few days.
Then you have try it all over again

Then folks say "Facebook's just not stable. It just wants to take my money and it doesn't work."

Let's be very clear, in a very blended situation, remember what you're supposed to do, is just let Facebook put the ad wherever it wants and just move about your day and make better ads because that's actually what makes a big difference.

And if you want to know more about that, remember targeting with creative is absolutely what you should be doing. All of this other stuff is fancy buttons. So you can push and pull so that you can get in your own way.

Facebook includes these options because not everybody on the platform is trying to make money.
There are people on the platform that very specific needs.

Like I used to spend $1M dollars a day for a brand and making money wasn't even on the table, it was market research and publicity. So there are reasons why other options are available, but it doesn't mean that it's right for you, especially if making money is your objective.

If you're in the e-com or direct to consumer space, go auto placement because of this exact example:
Maybe Instagram works, when it spends 20 cents on the dollar, but as soon as you spend all of your money there,
Hey, it stops working.

Then you're complaining about Facebook not working
It's because you removed all the good choices
because you removed the balance
because you just tried to exploit the one thing that worked and then you're complaining when it doesn't work anymore.

The reason the placement worked is because it wasn't actually having to do that much work.
Yes, your star employee did exceptional.
When you asked them to do one thing a day.
When you ask them to now do a hundred things a day, it sucks.

Cause you didn't actually have something that worked well. You had something that in a limited fashion produced a better than average results.
What you really want to be mindful of is that average results.

Let's get to the second thing that you may or may not be seeing. The CPMs, since the stories are super cheap, you could be tempted to just got to throw there because CPMs, niching more people that's going to help me make a purchase.

Now let's chase this.
Yes, showing your ads to more people is probably going to help you see more purchases. And yes, we do talk about targeting broad because it has the lowest base CPM.

However, when you're targeting just stories, understand that there's a reason that CPM is super low is because it's super, super low quality. Very few sales occur in the stories placement. It is very low quality inventory. So it's low cost if conversions are your objective.

So because we have far fewer people advertising for conversions, because it's a far lower quality space, the inventory is super cheap. That's why things are cheap. Not because they're new, nobody's exploiting it, because a bunch of people have and it doesn't work.

Since nobody else is playing that game, you could think there might be an edge there for you to exploit it, but the honest truth is that's what you should be doing when you're spending $50k or a $100k dollars and you need to find a slight little tweak.

If you're spending $500 or $5k a day, there are so many other things you can do to actually move the business forward. Not try to find a little win in a little spot. That's not scalable. That goes against normal consumer behavior.

The third thing that we see constantly is people say...
"well, this is an Instagram ad, or this is a Facebook ad."

If you make an ad specifically to exclude the majority of overall users, what you are doing is removing the ability for Facebook to make these large journeys.

You are basically saying:
"Facebook, I'm not going to let you do the thing that you're really good at. I'm not gonna let you find the best sale at the best price, because I've determined that I'm going to make you dumb because I want to feel smart."

Next, you're basically saying:
"When I fail, it's going to be Facebook's fault."
Which is complete BS.

Anyway, I hope that explained things...

Now, what do I recommend you do?

*Auto-placement* let Facebook decide
Do not segment out by placement.
That is an absolute old hack that didn't work back when it was talked about many years ago & it honestly hasn't worked since the optimized CPM environment came into play.

So because Facebook isn't Google, it's not Amazon. It's not email You don't worry about placement.
You worry about the quality of the ad in the customer journey. That's the real hack, running a good business and caring about your customer.