New Facebook Ads Strategy for CHEAP Ads

Facebook is always changing things, and lately the changes have been coming quickly. One of the more recent additions, reservation buying type (formerly known as Reach and Frequency), has sparked curiosity among advertisers seeking greater control and predictability.

This guide shows you all about the reservation buying type, helping you understand its functionalities, limitations, and strategic applications. You’ll find out where and when to use this and how in some cases it can dramatically lower your ad costs.

Where to Find the Reservation Buying Type

I want to point out where to find the reservation buying type because it’s in a place that most people who create a lot of ads just skip over. It’s also NOT the default setting.

Right after you click on the green create campaign button you can choose your buying type.

Auction Buying Type

Before going further into reservation buying type, it’s important to understand the traditional auction-based system that most people use on Facebook Ads.

In this system, advertisers compete for ad space through real-time auctions. The ad with the highest combined value, determined by factors like bid, estimated action rates, and ad quality, generally gets the best rates.

The more competition there is, the higher the ad costs. The less competition there is the lower the ad costs.

This dynamic approach offers flexibility in targeting and optimization but can lead to unpredictable costs and fluctuating campaign performance.  

The auction buying type is still the best choice for most lead generation and sales campaigns as it almost always gives the best results for these types of campaigns.

Reservation Buying Type

If you’ve run Facebook ads before then you will see right away that the reservation buying type is quite a bit different from running a Meta auction. The first thing that you’ll notice is that there are a limited number of campaign objectives.

In a reservation buying type you are limited to awareness and engagement campaigns. There are no sales objectives, lead objectives or anything other than awareness and engagement campaigns.

For this example I’m going to use an awareness campaign.

In my agency we use a lot of sales and lead generation campaigns, but we also use awareness (reach) campaigns for omnipresent Facebook campaigns.

Setting Up a Reservation Campaign

Once you choose a reservation campaign there isn’t much else to do at the campaign level, so we will move onto the ad level of the campaign. This is where things start to get significantly different from a traditional auction campaign.

With a reservation buying type you’ll generally be using this for broader audiences and it’s much more of a mass market approach than what most local businesses will take.

So this will generally work the best with larger geo targeting areas – like countries and the location targeting is the same as what you are used to seeing. 

Ad Formats

Ad formats is where things start to get significantly different. 

The default is an image or carousel, but there are lots of other options as well, and if you are just starting out just pick the ones that apply. Don’t overthink it. 

Placement Settings

Then we get to the placement settings. This is the only place in Meta ads that I know of where manual placements is the default setting.

Meta is really pushing most advertisers into advantage+ placements and for lead generation and conversion campaigns I find that advantage+ works really well.

In this case Meta has automatically chosen Facebook, Instagram, and audience network. I would personally take it a step further and uncheck the audience network and just use the reservation buying type on Facebook and Instagram.

That’s just because audience network typically offers lower quality impressions and since with this type of campaign you are optimizing for engagement or awareness then you want to get ads in front of the highest quality impressions as inexpensively as possible.  

Brand Safety and Suitability

Next is the brand safety and suitability category. This is an interesting one. You can find it in other campaign types sometimes, but it’s front and center here and I want to explain why I think that is.

As you can see there are three categories: expanded inventory, moderate inventory, and limited inventory. This is all about what big brands are comfortable having their content featured next to.

Generally speaking, the larger your brand the more sensitive you need to be about brand consistency and image. And that means that you need to be careful where your content appears.

For most brands moderate inventory is a good choice. And it’s what I’m using in this example.

Optimization and Delivery

The next step is optimization and delivery. What you see here will depend on whether you choose awareness or engagement.

For the awareness campaign that I’m using for this example, you will see maximize reach of ads and maximize ad recall lift.

The idea with maximize ad recall lift is that you are showing ads to people who will remember you better.  However, I don’t think Facebook is actually very good at measuring this. So, I just use the first option – maximize reach of ads. 

That will make Facebook try to show your ads to as many people as possible, which is usually the best option for this type of campaign.

Frequency Control

The next option that I want to point out is frequency control. If you are familiar with my omnipresent ad strategy, then you know we used frequency control a lot in those campaigns.

For this type of campaign, the default options of target and showing an ad to a person one time every seven days work well.

Delivery Scheduling Preference

Next we see delivery scheduling preference. This is a really interesting option.

You can choose from standard  or sequenced. This lets you either optimize for the best performing ads or deliver your ads in a specific order.

What you choose here depends on the goals of your campaign. 

For instance, if you are running a sale then you may want to show your ads in a specific order that shows how close the deadline is. Sequencing allows you to do that. It’s a pretty powerful feature in the right circumstances. 

Reservation Estimates

Now if you head over to the right hand side of the screen, you will see another unique feature of the reservation buying type. It’s called reservation estimates.

You need to be careful here because the defaults can be really wild. In the example I’m showing you they are giving me a default of over 8,000 pounds of spend for this campaign.

This is very unlike the auction campaigns where the default spend starts at $20 a day.

Make sure you check this before you want one of these campaigns!

You can change this budget, but they do have a minimum rate of 200,000 people. So you need to have enough budget to support that.

For this example, I’m going to put in a budget of 1,000 pounds. You can see here that I would get an incredibly low CPM of under 1 pound  per thousand impressions. with a huge reach of a million people for 1,000 pounds.

That’s an incredibly low price, and because it’s a reservation campaign it’s going to be relatively stable.

This is perfect if you really need to push your brand out there fast and at a low cost.

Spend Per Day

The next thing I want to point out is spend per day. this is really interesting, because Facebook will front load your spend into the first few days and then gradually taper off from there.

My guess is because Facebook believes that this is going to give you the most and best exposure for this type of campaign. 

The final step in this reservation campaign is to reserve and upload. Make sure you know what you’re doing when you do this because it will lock you into this campaign at this price.

Another Awesome Free Facebook Training Resource

There is nothing I like better than to see business owners increase their ROI with Facebook Ads. In order to help business owners succeed with Facebook ads I’ve created a FREE webinar training that you can register for here.

When you attend this webinar you’ll learn:

3 different Facebook ad strategies that we use every day. These strategies have generated millions of dollars in revenue and are tried and proven to work.

How to customize the Facebook ads strategy to your particular business. There is no such thing as a one size fits all approach to Facebook ads.

How Facebook and Instagram have changed and how to adjust your ad strategy to what works in 2023.

When Should You Use a Reservation Buying Type Vs an Auction Buying Type?

It’s very tempting to look at these CPM prices and think I should always use this type of  reservation campaign. And they do work very well for some things. If you are a brand looking to create awareness or buzz, this type of campaign can work very well.

But for lead generation or sales,  you will want to use an auction buying type that has those goals. You will almost always get better performance with a conversion campaign.

Of course, it’s always a good idea to test different things in your business especially when meta is rolling out new options. Just make sure they are tests that you can afford.