ADS Marketing and Consulting Firm |web design |seo |internet marketing: Understanding Facebook’s new reach & frequency campaign type

Facebook ads have long been scrutinized by major advertisers for a lack of control over frequency capping and a lack of accurate traffic estimates. In an effort to answer these concerns, Facebook has started beta testing a new campaign type that focusses specifically on those points.

The new reach & frequency campaign type from Facebook is the newest campaign structure created for major advertisers who wish to more accurately plan and predict the delivery, cost and reach of brand campaigns.

The key advantages/features of this campaign type are:

You can now enter a lifetime campaign frequency cap for each individual

Receive reach and budget estimates that are 99 percent accurate (according to Facebook)

Increase the reach of unique people across your target audience

An indicator bar to give you the percentage of people you will be reaching out of your total potential audience

You can now receive your estimates through either a maximum budget amount or a desired reach goal

By allowing advertisers to cap the amount of times an ad is seen by a user, the potential reach and the reach quality of each campaign will undoubtedly increase without increasing spend.

Another interesting aspect of this campaign type is the potential reach indicator bar. As anyone who has published ads on Facebook will tell you, estimating an accurate potential reach is next to impossible. This new tool allows you to accurately see how much of your target audience you will actually reach with your budget amount, which will inevitably increase how much major advertisers are willing to spend.

For the time being there are several temporary limitations on this new (beta version) campaign type:

It is only available in CPM pricing

Campaigns must last a minimum of 3 days and a maximum of 30 days

You cannot pause campaigns or change goals

Only available for page posts or domain ads

Only one ad unit can be running at a time

No friend-of-fan or fan exclusion targeting, only fan targeting available

Facebook campaigns from the same page targeting the same audience will jeopardize the ability of reach and frequency campaigns to deliver in full

Some of these restrictions will be removed in the upcoming months, once the campaign type has been rolled out and released to the general public.

This campaign type addresses most of the concerns voiced by major advertisers and will inevitably increase Facebook’s relevance when considering which platform to spend advertising dollars on.

For the past week my fellow colleagues and I have been impressed by the results achieved by this campaign type so far, and as we continue with our comparison testing we expect to effectively prove that this campaign type is by far the most effective.

Matthew Gangnier is a Paid Social Analyst at iProspect, a leading global digital performance marketing agency. He is responsible for Facebook and Twitter social ad campaigns for major national advertisers in Canada. When he’s not driving digital performance for his clients, Matthew loves golfing and the great outdoors.