Running a Facebook Ads Campaign?  Make Sure You Segment Based on Ad Placement!

Placement Segmenting is really important.

It’s important because of the way Facebook favours some placement over others.  And to really appreciate how that happens, come with me on a thought experiment.

Think back to when you were 14 and you got your hands on a new album.  You would play that thing to death, you’d wear out the tape/cd/mp3/8track.  I bet there are still songs you hear today and think – you can’t enjoy this and it’s your fault, you killed this song for yourself.

Radio stations have always done this to new music, and still do it.  But back to Facebook.

Facebook acts a little like your 14 year old self.

Except instead of doing this to music, it does this with placements.  Right now Facebook has a teenage crush on mobile devices.  It’s putting all its effort on mobile – and your budget there too, if you’re not careful.  (and when you think about it from Facebooks perspective – why not?  Essentially Facebook lives in the pocket & purse of just about everyone.)

The danger is this.  Unless you tell Facebook not too, it’s going to use up all your budget on one placement, and you guessed it, mobile. Here’s proof:

Here I was using a test custom audience of people who hadn’t visited the site in 60 days.  Part of an ongoing retention effort.  I used the newsfeed because I wanted the ads to have more impact than a right hand side column, but in my haste (caught up with patting myself on the back for having a bright test idea), I didn’t bother with placement segmenting between mobile & desktop.

And look what happened.

97% of the spend went to mobile!!

That’s beyond obsessed teenager levels.

It wasn’t so long ago that marketers avoided mobile because mobile users just didn’t convert. It seems that trend is changing (rapidly) – but that’s no argument for spending 3 dollars out of every $100 on desktops!

The lesson here is to keep an eye on your placement & budget accordingly!  Otherwise your marketing cash is going to only end up in one place.  And that place is whatever Facebook is playing with at the moment – for now it’s mobile.

Liked this? Check out more Facebook tips and ideas:

Hack Facebook’s Relevance Score

Use Boosted Posts for Audience Intelligence

Max Your Facebook Creative

Graph Search, India & Tony Abbot