Letting Meta ads work for you

Meta's Artificial Intelligence (AI) and algorithms are constantly evolving to improve advertiser and user experiences. Too often, advertisers aren't building their campaigns in ways that allow them to fully leverage these advancements, because they are:

• Creating too many ad sets that tend to have overlapping audiences.
• Limiting the number of placements they opt in to.
• Structuring bidding and budgets in a restrictive way that prevents ads from delivering to the most cost-effective audiences.
• Building too many similar creatives and/or having too many ads in one ad set.

These examples can lead to underperformance of ads and create difficulties for scaling ad sets, which results in more budget being spent in the learning phase before our ad delivery system has fully optimised the performance of your ads.

Government, politics and charity advertisers should leverage Meta's machine learning and optimisation tools as an opportunity to test new strategies instead of leaning on manual controls of bidding and budgets, complicated audience targeting and excessive amounts of creative.

Meta's machine learning leverages data and pairs it with what you know about your audience. You tell our ad delivery system the kind of people that you want to reach, and our system follows your guidance to match creative to the right people who are most likely to take an action. We use these signals to continuously learn and improve as we serve ads to your audience.

By opting in to products that utilise machine learning, you should see optimal results that require a much less hands-on approach. Consider the following features and campaign parameters to let our machine learning do the heavy lifting for you.

Meta Advantage campaign budget (formerly campaign budget optimisation, or CBO) is a way of optimising the distribution of a campaign budget across your campaign's ad sets. This means we automatically and continuously find the best active opportunities for results across your ad sets and distribute your campaign budget in real time to get those results.

Advantage campaign budget still allows for budgeting controls between ad sets but doing so could limit the flexibility your campaign can have when optimising for the best performing ad sets. Learn more about ad set spend limits and our best practices.

Lowest cost bidding tells our systems to bid with the goal of getting you the lowest cost per optimisation event while also spending your budget. However, we understand that cost controls are important for some advertisers, so you may want to explore cost and bid controls instead.

If using the above two strategies together, ensure that you know what to look for by understanding advantage campaign budget reporting when using lowest cost bidding.

Advantage+ Placements (formerly automatic placements) enable Facebook to get the best results available across all default placements that are available. Advantage+ Placements efficiently uses your budget and helps control costs. Note that if you are running ads about social issues, elections or politics, some placements will not be available to your ads. We still recommend that you leverage Advantage+ placements: you will not be charged for placements that aren't available for ads that fall in scope of social issues, elections or politics. Learn more here.

Audience simplification, or consolidating your ad sets and keeping audiences broad, should be adapted when you are looking to achieve scale with your campaigns. If audiences are too small or ad sets are duplicative and overlapping, you can experience delivery complications that limit results and scale. This is because our algorithm has to further break up your budget to test delivery and results on more ad sets.

Dynamic creative optimises ad creative combinations by taking multiple ad components (such as images, videos, titles, descriptions and CTAs) and automatically generating combinations of these assets across audiences. Consider adopting dynamic creative to let our systems determine the most efficient combination based on results, rather than spending your time building dozens or even hundreds of ads.

Government, political and charitable organisations have a finite amount of time and resources. Taking a hands-off approach of simplifying your campaigns and opting in to products that fully leverage machine learning will allow you to see results that work for you.

Consider diving deeper into reporting and analysing your results when using automated tactics for your campaigns.