11th September 2020

POV: Facebook Ad Limit

Background:

Facebook has now provided details around its previous announcement that it is capping the number of ads a page is permitted to run concurrently, rolling out from February 2021. Having announced the impending restrictions in November of last year, it has now revealed that there will be several ‘tiers’ of restrictions based on the size of the advertiser in terms of spend.

Details and Implications:

Traditionally advertisers have sought to personalise campaigns by manually creating high volumes of ads in the hopes that the right creative would ultimately find the right person. Each ad needs to deliver a certain amount of impressions for Facebook to glean the necessary learnings for campaign optimisation. The more ads there are to deliver, the less each delivers and therefore the longer it takes to fully optimise campaigns. Facebook claims that 4 in 10 ads that are running fail to gather enough data to exit the ‘learning phase’ - meaning they are not optimised to their full potential.

With the platform beginning to instead favour dynamic formats that leverage machine learning to deliver highly personalised ads, limiting the number of ads an advertiser can run is designed to create a movement towards simpler and more effective Facebook ad campaigns.

Facebook is bucketing advertisers into four groups, determined by the page’s highest spending month in the past year. The tiers of restrictions will range from 250 ads per page (for small to medium-sized pages with less than $100k in their highest spending month in the last 12 months) to 20,000 ads (for the platform’s largest spenders with more than $10m in their highest spending month in the last 12 months).

Advertisers will be able to see their assigned ad limit via the Ad Limits per Page tool in Ad Manager. If a page has multiple ad accounts, limits can be set per account to prevent ad accounts over-using inventory. The ad limits consist of the total number of ads running at any time, including those under review and not yet live. Advertisers can remove or pause live versions of ads to free up slots.

Facebook is making the announcement now so that advertisers have the time to prepare for any potential changes they may need to make. According to Facebook, the changes are set to improve the performance of ads on its platform.

Summary:

The limit is another move in Facebook’s drive towards a simpler platform. Favouring dynamic formats and encouraging larger data-sets for better optimisation are a couple of ways Facebook is trying to make its platform simpler and more effective for advertisers.

Further Reading:

Social Media Today | Search Engine Journal | Facebook

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