Facebook Reach ads are designed to maximise the number of people who see your ad and the frequency at which they see the ad. In this post we explore whether these ads are the correct choice for your business.
Facebook Reach ads – why you should be using them
Facebook Reach ads share a lot of similarities with Brand Awareness ads. The main similarity is that they are both designed to get your ad in front of as many people as possible.
However, Reach ads come with one main advantage – frequency capping. This allows you to determine how many times your ad should be shown to one person before they don’t see it again.
This is a very useful feature as it allows us to limit the number and frequency of the times our ad is shown. This can be useful to avoid issues of spamming someone’s Facebook feed which can be a turn off for some consumers.
With the age old, advertising rule of thumb being that an ad needs to be seen 7 times before people act upon it, do you think your audience are seeing your Facebook ads enough?
Facebook Reach ads – why you shouldn’t be using them
The issue with Reach ads is that getting as many people to see your ad can come at the expense of other metrics. When you choose the Reach ad objective, your Facebook ads are shown to as many unique people as possible, without really trying to get them to do more than look at your ad.
This is of course important – if no one looks at your ad, nothing can happen as a result. But when there are so many options available for how people can engage with an ad, restricting this ability for the sake of a few more eyeballs seems like a massive opportunity lost.
If these reach and impression figures are important to you and your business, more power to you. But be prepared to see high reach and impression figures, and not much else.
Social Acumen opinion on Facebook Reach ads
As you might be able to tell, we feel that there are better options available to you than Reach ads.
We made this point with our blog about Brand Awareness ads – the issue can be quantity over quality. Reach ads can be useful when you have the ability to set a limit on the amount of times that you reach your audience with an ad.
However, we’ve seen a lot of instances where ad performance for metrics like clicks and purchases produce diminishing returns the higher your frequency is. Once Facebook has shown your ad to the most viable members of your target audience, it may not matter how many times they see it – if they aren’t going to engage, they aren’t going to engage.
Reach is an incredibly important part of your social media strategy. Without Reach, no one sees ads. But you can achieve this reach with other ad objectives while also achieving meaningful actions from your audience that you don’t get with Reach ads.
Related links and Case Studies
If you’re keen to explore how we helped FaceGym to reach more of their target customers that helped them to grow their business then have a look at our FaceGym Case Study.
