Facebook Reach and Frequency Ads: What Percentage Of Audience To Reach?

Short answer: It depends…

Long answer: You need to consider your budget, what percentage of the base you’d like to reach and most importantly, how does the cost increase as you try to reach more people.

If you check ANY Reach and Frequency planning insights in FB Ads, you’ll see a curve like below. Spike in beginning followed by sharp decrease in Reach.

As a check, I decided to check on 5 random audiences in FB Ads to see how does the cost change.

Audience 1: US, 25-44, Objective: Brand Awareness

Audience 2: KSA: 18+, Objective: Views

Audience 3: UK, 18+, Interest: Tourism, Objective: App Installs

Audience 4: Canada, 13+, Engaged Shoppers, Objective: Reach

Audience 5: Pakistan, 18+, All parents, Objective: Traffic

For all 5 audiences, I used entire FB ads as placement along with 2 impressions / week

Once you check on all 5 markets with percentiles for audiences [10/20/30/40/50], you should find a table such as below:

Repeat across all audiences.

Except Pakistan, all other audiences showed an upward leaning curve in CPM’s as a higher percentage of audience was reached. For some audiences, 50% was the maximum available.

Do some more basic Pivot Table work on CPMs and what we have below is where the base is 10% of audience reached and then the next percentile CPM’s compared to the base to know how the CPM behaves.

As the CPM’s for audiences were different, I added the CPM increases for each audience as it moved from 10% to the next percentile. In all of the above audiences, the CPM’s increased, in a relatively similar fashion.

Let’s pick an audience, UK 18+. So, from above chart, I can know that it I wanted to reach 40% of the audience instead of 10% of audience, I can expect to pay about 60% higher CPM’s compared to what I would pay for reaching 10% of the audience.

Which is why, from a demand and supply perspective, wanting to reach a higher percentage of the audience is a strong demand signal that gets factored into the pricing aspect.

In the above chart, if you wanted to point that out just by observing the chart, you can see that after 40%, the price increase in CPMs is quite a lot. Of course, that point will differ from audience to audience but based on what I’ve seen in a lot of audiences, 40-50% of audience reach is that point at which you could re-look at the cost increase vs additional benefits of reaching the audience.

Hope this post helped. Would you have any questions about the Reach and Frequency planner?