Facebook Reach and Frequency Buying Models Explained
Facebook’s Reach and Frequency campaign planner is super helpful in branding campaigns as it allows the advertiser to maximize the audience reach (as primary goal) and then a secondary goal that could be reach, brand awareness, engagement, views, traffic or even conversions. What’s awesome about Reach and Frequency buying the ability to cap the number of impressions per user and allow sequential targeting.
Compared to auction buying, I would say that Reach and Frequency buying easily nets 1.5-2X higher reach from the same budget. This post looks at how different models within Reach and Frequency impact the CPMs.
Example:
Target audience: 18+, everyone in the UAE on all platforms
Campaign flight dates: June 2019
Budget: $5 K
Impressions: Max 2 per week
Primary Objective: Reach and Frequency
Secondary Objective: Brand Awareness
Version 1: $5K nets you 1.6 M reach, 5.5 M impressions at $0.91 CPM with an average frequency of 3.27
Version 2: Let’s increase the average frequency only while retaining all other aspects from Version 1
In Version 2, you get slightly lower reach at 1.3 M, 5.8 M impressions, the CPM decreased to $0.86 and the frequency increased to 4.32
If you compare the distribution of impression frequency per user, that’s where can see the main difference between the two models.
Version 1 is slightly more skewed in terms on frequency per user. In Version 1, 26% of the reach will see the content only once compared to 16% in Version 2. As you can see the green bars for Version 2, it’s more balanced and almost equally distributed, compared to Version 1.
We can also compare the two models to know which one allows us to reach a higher percentage of the target audience base and by how much.
In a Reach and Frequency buying model, the two most important settings can be these two:
Bid optimization for continuous 2 sec views, 10 sec views (going away soon) or ThruPlay (15 sec bid optimization)
Paying for impression vs Views
Depending on your video length, you might want to use the ThruPlay optimization (default) as it tries to find users who are more likely to watch at least 15 sec of your video (not a guarantee though).
The second option: Getting charged for impression vs ThruPlay is what can make a big difference in your Cost Per View, Video Retention Rate
By choosing to pay for ThruPlays [only when 15 sec are watched], you are forcing additional parameters on Facebook Ads to find such users. The CPV’s have to definitely higher compared to impression based bidding where a 15 sec view may or may not occur [no guarantees].
Hope you found this post helpful. Do let me know via comments if you’d like know more about anything in particular and how has your experience been with Reach and Frequency planner.
