What Facebook Ad Limits Mean for Advertisers
Towards the backend of 2020, Facebook announced they will be introducing limits on the number of ads a page can run. Fast forward to 2021 and we are starting to see this roll out in action. We’ve taken a look at what ad limits mean for advertisers and how you can still create campaigns that allow for flexibility.
This seems counter-intuitive, right? Why would a company that made 99% of its 2020 revenue from advertising want to limit advertisers from running ads?
The answer — according to Facebook — is all to do with machine learning.
The number of active ads from your page plays an important role in achieving more predictable, stable and optimised results….
… When an advertiser runs too many ads at once, each ad delivers less often. This means that fewer ads exit the learning phase, and more budget is spent before the delivery system can optimise performance.
From a logical standpoint, this makes sense for the most part. When considered alongside the iOS14 updates and the reduction in trackable events, it makes even more sense for Facebook to focus on allowing its machine learning to be as efficient as possible.
While the above is likely to be the core reason, there’s no doubt the limit is also a result of the ad platform becoming ‘bloated’ and struggling to deal with the number of ads running on the platform — you would have felt this first hand with how ‘buggy’ Facebook Ads Manager has been over recent months. Add in the need for ad approvals, it makes a lot of sense for Facebook to limit the number of ads a page can run.
So, what are these limits?
As part of this change, Facebook has created four tiers all based on ad spend:
The important thing to note is that the limit is on a page, not the ad account, meaning you can’t simply create a new ad account to get around the issue. Vice versa, if you use one ad account for two or more Facebook pages, each page has its own limit.
The limit is also only applicable to ads that are online and running —drafts, old ads or upcoming ads are not included as long as they are offline.
And finally, the limit functions in real time. Meaning if you have an account that is permitted to run 250 ads and currently have 250 ads in market, as soon as you turn an ad off, you will be able to turn a replacement ad on.
Is there an easy way to work out the number of ads I’m running?
There sure is. Facebook has added an ‘Ad Limits Per Page’ tool under Business Tools in Business Manager.
This tool then provides an overview of the ad limits for each of your accounts, showing you the hard cap number and the amount currently live.
For most advertisers, this change is going to have very little effect on how they use the platform, however, for those brands that test extensively, there will be a few things you can do to ensure you maximise the number of ads available.
- Utilise dynamic ad creative as much as possible.
- If something is out of learning phase and not working, turn it off and try an alternative.
- Use collection and carousel ads with auto product selection — this ensures any cover image is broad enough to apply to a mass number of products.
- Keep a proportion of ads unused for any ad-hoc or sale campaigns.
