As the number of businesses using Facebook as an advertising platform has increased, so has the ad offering. At one point, Facebook offered over 25 different types of ads. Now this has been streamlined to ensure that only the most effective ad formats will be used and that all ads are driven by well-defined objectives.

The main ad types and placement are as follows:

Terminology

‘Page Post Engagements’ is a term Facebook often references. This term encompasses many types of ads, including sponsored posts, boosted posts, page post links, and page post likes. The generic term describes all ads that involve a post to a page with an action.

Promoted Posts

Promoting a post on your page is a great way of getting a larger audience engaged with an important piece of content or promotion. For a set budget you can boost a post, which will increase its visibility in the feed of people who like your page, as well as their friends. Promoted posts that are created in Ads Manager can be very effective because they offer targeting pricing and bidding options.

With promoted posts, Facebook can guarantee a certain audience reach for a fixed budget. In addition to this audience size, there will also be instances where organic reach happens.



Once the ad has finished running, there may be people who continue to see it and interact with it because of the high level of engagement it received when it was promoted. Paid activity on Facebook therefore has the ancillary benefit of generating increased organic activity, which is not included in the budgeted paid cost.

Boosted Posts

Boosted posts are available to pages with 50 likes or more and are a simpler version of promoted posts. To boost a post you can click on the settings icon on any post and easily set a budget, duration and target.

With a boosted post you have the option to select the audience. You can chose fans of your page and their friends or you can chose to select targeting criteria. Target age, gender, location and up to ten interests users may have.

It’s important to note that you can’t edit a boosted post once it’s running. You will need to delete the post first. Once deleted you can go back into the Power Editor or Ads Manager, edit the post and then re-boost it.

Multi-Product Ads

Multi-product ads let businesses show three products in a single ad unit, through a carousel-like feature. These are available through Facebook’s API to developers.

If a potential customer visits your website, browses through many pages but doesn’t make a purchase, then Facebook’s multi-product ad can help target that individual and encourage them to return to the site and make a purchase.

As part of multi-product ads, you can define a specific audience you’d like to target. These could be people who haven’t visited your website in a certain amount of time or people who have come and clicked on a number of pages but did not go through with a transaction.

Video Ads

In order to promote a video on Facebook it must be uploaded to Facebook, not hosted elsewhere. Video ads help increase the number times a video is viewed. Video ads can also have a call-to-action allowing you to direct users to a specific page or make an action. This call-to-action will be embedded at the end of the video. A view is counted if a user watches up to 3 seconds of the video with or without sound.

Premium video ads also exist for a selected group of advertisers on Facebook. These are 15-second video ads with high-quality sight, sound and motion. Facebook has been very open about its desire to compete with television ads and this represents its current testing ground.

Domain ads

This is the simplest form of Facebook ad, containing a title, a short piece of copy and a link to a website. These can only be displayed on the right hand side and the main objective for this type of ad is to drive traffic to a site. Unlike most other type of ads, to use a domain ad, you don’t need to have a Facebook page setup Learn more here: