Advertiser controls

Advertiser controls are the inputs you can change to help improve your ad performance. There are many advertiser control adjustments you can make to optimize your campaign performance. Adjustments can be made to your charge choice or bid strategy, your ad placement, your targeting strategy, your optimization strategy and your budget. By adjusting the advertiser controls that you’re opting into, you would be adjusting potential reach and spend, possibly affecting cost outcomes.

Adjusting charge choices

Your charge choice or “when you get charged” is one of the advertiser controls you can adjust in your ad set creation. Your charge choice indicates what and when you will pay for your ad and it tells us which event types you want to fund with your budget. The choices you have depend on what objective you’ve chosen. Although it’s not generally recommended, unless there is a specific reason why you want to be charged on a CPC, you do have the option of adjusting your charge choice. For many optimization goals, you will pay each time your ad is served (known as an impression). Some optimization goals also let you choose between impressions and actions (such as link clicks, views, or installs).

Note: You may not have a charge option other than impressions if you select certain campaign objectives or if you create a new ad account. To ensure the integrity of new ad accounts we require that you spend at least $10 USD for impressions before you can select another charge choice. 

Adjusting placements

Placements are where people will see your ad. We can deliver your ads across Facebook Products, which include Facebook, Instagram, Audience Network and Messenger. You can adjust your placement by selecting one of the following options:

  • Automatic placement: By selecting automatic placements during ad creation, you enable us to deliver your ads to all available placements finding the best results across them. We recommend selecting automatic placements because it can help increase delivery and control costs. 
  • Edit placement: By selecting edit placements during ad set creation you have more control over what ads are shown for specific placements to ensure your ad displays how they want, if you’re concerned about brand safety. It’s not ideal to remove any of your ad placements, as that will increase your costs (less placements, means less inventory available, which means higher costs). If you’re looking for more opportunities to deliver your ads we suggest adding more placements. The more supply you opt into, the easier it is for us to connect you to your target audience. 

Adjusting audience

You can adjust your targeting strategy by narrowing or expanding your target audience. You can adjust these controls by using worldwide targeting (if your product is available outside of your specific region), using a higher-quality seed audience (for Lookalikes) and building on the interests you’re targeting for.

  • Narrow targeting: You may want to narrow your audience if you find that your ad is delivering too broadly for your campaign goal, This might be the case if you’re trying to reach a specific audience like return customers or men over 50. However, it’s not recommended that you narrow your target audience beyond what is important for your business, as that limits the reach opportunities.
  • Expand targeting: You may want to expand your audience if you’re experiencing lower delivery or under delivery due to a high overlap between your campaigns. We also recommend this option if you have a high percentage reach against your target audience. It’s important to continue to expand your audience or engage with them in different ways. 

Adjusting budgets

For each ad, you will set a budget. Once your budget is set, we will try to spend your budget evenly throughout the time your ads are running, unless your ads are set for accelerated delivery. You can adjust your budget if:

  • The campaign isn’t meeting your business goals, so you no longer want to spend as much on the campaign.
  • You have an additional budget to allocate to a campaign. In this case, you would increase the budgets based on your spend.
    Facebook doesn’t recommend that you frequently change your campaign budgets because this triggers the system to re-enter the learning phase, causing price instability. However, if you do want to make budget adjustments when using the auction, you can choose from these options:
  • Daily budget: The average amount you’re willing to spend on an ad set or campaign every day. Select this option if you don’t have a time frame in mind for their campaign, a total budget overall for a campaign, or just have a set amount that you want to spend per day. 

Lifetime budget:

The amount you’re willing to spend over the entire duration of your ad set or campaign. Lifetime budgets work best for pacing a defined budget over the lifetime of a campaign. Our system can increase your budget when it finds lower-cost outcomes and decrease your budget when it finds higher- cost outcomes. This enables flexible pacing, optimizing your budget to an overall lifetime goal, rather than trying to hit the same goal every day.