Facebook Lauches Reach and Frequency Tool

The Reach and Frequency Tool is a way to bring reach and frequency planning and buying, similar to traditional broadcast, to Facebook. It allows marketers to build their brands on Facebook by focusing on the number of people they can reach and how many times that advertiser can message them. 

How It Works

Facebook has worked to make this fairly easy to implement.  Impressions are booked and planned as in an IO but can now be done against reach levels and specific audience targets (except website custom audiences and fan exclusion targeting) at a fixed price.  It works across video and display and on mobile and desktop, and ads can run in either the right hand column or within the News Feed (but not both).  

When to Use It

With specific parameters around campaign length and KPI not every advertiser or campaign will be a good fit for the R/F tool but we see advantages for advertisers under certain conditions:

When there’s a strong desire to plan against reach, frequency or budget goals.  By guaranteeing specific audiences at a fixed price R/F takes the guess work out of the auction marketplace and ensures that messages are delivered to relevant audiences at effective frequency levels.

Advertisers looking to own a specific SOV against a particular target.  R/F allows an advertiser to reserve up to 90% of an audience and they can do so with any number of creative messages, thereby ensuring that they can deliver the right message to the right audience at the right time.  However, as campaigns cannot be paused or adjusted once they’ve gone live options for optimizing campaigns in-flight are limited with R/F.  One exception is with creative delivery:  while specific sequencing isn’t yet an option the Facebook algorithm will optimize toward the most impactful or efficient message. 

When the advertiser isn’t running another campaign on Facebook against the same audience target.  While it’s possible to run simultaneous campaigns with only one utilizing the R/F guarantees Facebook doesn’t recommend doing so as one campaign may end up cannibalizing the audience for the other thereby leading to under-delivery.  

Limitations And Considerations

While MEC is enthusiastic about the possibilities Facebook R/F opens, advertisers should be cautioned against believing it is a one-size-fits-all solution to buying and planning on Facebook.  Key considerations include:

Campaign objective & audience: R/F is best suited to advertisers looking to drive upper-funnel metrics against larger audience targets.  It should not be considered for campaigns with DR objectives or smaller initiatives that have very specific targets that may not be able to satisfy an overall reach of 1 million users.

Competitive environment:  there are significant implications for key periods such as holiday, Black Friday, etc. when more advertisers will be in-market for similar audiences and competition may be higher than usual.  This could cause a shift in the way we buy social as it may require more planning, less real time decisions, and more competitive pricing.