So many people take a look at reporting and think about they should do is optimized by placement… This is terribly wrong.

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When looking at Reporting, you can see how things did buy where are the ad was placed. A lot of folks well then take a look at this data and say well did great here and it did poorly there so what I’m gonna do is I’m just gonna get rid of where did poorly and then It will do great.  Well this makes sense on paper, remember that Facebook is an oCPM platform, which means that every touch point delivers a blended result that we need to respect.  Unlike email, display, programmatic etc. Facebook is controlling the user journey across multiple devices across multiple apps and with different add types within each app. So showing somebody an ad in one place to get them to convert someplace else far more efficiently is something that occurs at scale and in an Automatic fashion.  Old school advertisers will tell you that this is something that happens in the real world all the time. And anybody with common sense will tell you if you are only ever trying to sell things, and have no respect for the customer, you’re not gonna be in business very long.  So what does this mean for Facebook...  First off, when you’re looking at performance broken out by placement, or device, or platform, you’re looking at an out of context data point and that immediately reduces the actionability of the information.   Maybe you did really well on Facebook newsfeed but really bad in Instagram stories… Maybe you’re seeing super low spend on Stories, but really good CPA, and you’re wondering why can I just spend everything there…  Part of the reason that you’re seeing efficiencies in some places with low spend because you’re only spending on the people that are likely to buy there in that inventory at that time. However, very very very rarely does anybody ever click on an ad in by the first time they ever see anything.  What this really means is that Facebook, in a way that no other platform on the planet in the history of advertising has ever been able to do, is curating somebody’s experience across multiple devices across multiple apps across multiple placements, to get them to take the actions that you’re bidding on, while also giving them the highest quality and user journey.  So what’s going to happen if you start optimizing for placement, eliminating all the apparently lesser options? Well, we know it’s gonna happen… You’re going to see the place that did really well start to really bad, really fast.   Do you ever notice that things that work really well seem to only work for a few days? Do you think this could possibly be because where you see success is due to a balanced approach, and as soon as you disrupt that balance by making destructive changes things go poorly very quickly?  So what are we supposed to do? Don’t worry about breaking information down by placement, it’s a nice bit of information to have, but it is a completely useless data point to try to take advantage of to improve your account.