Facebook Ads Enough Impressions Rule

Facebook Ads Playbook: Enough Impressions Rule

Part of Pearmill’s Facebook Advertising Playbook

The most common mistake we see advertisers make is not having a clear framework for knowing when to make a decision regarding an Ad Unit. A significant part of our rules series will focus on giving you clear guidelines on how and when to make decisions.

We want to be clear enough so that you never have to ask yourself if you’re waiting too long. Or are you not waiting long enough? Is this Ad Unit doing well after a day? Two days? 10 Clicks? 100 Conversions? 2k Impressions?

Note: there’s a mini glossary at the end of this post for all the capitalized words and phrases we’re using as a way to keep everything consistent across our rules series.

Enough Impressions Rule

The main purpose of this rule is to make sure that we aren’t making changes to an Ad Unit, Ad Set, or Campaign too early or too late.

Our ruling here is based on years of experience, though it’s not at all statistically significant. As with all things around Facebook Ads, you should take it with a grain of salt.

However, we can confidently say that the number below is the minimum amount of Impressions you should be comfortable with.

Rule

Before making a decision about any Ad Unit, Creative, Ad Set, or Campaign — you should have AT LEAST received over 2,000 Impressions on it.

This assumes that you only have one Creative, one Ad Unit, one Ad Set within the Campaign.

Caveats

This number doesn’t linearly scale across Campaigns that have multiple Ad Units or Ad Sets, so we do recommend looking at the data on an Ad Unit basis to keep things simple.

To reiterate — this is the minimum and not a maximum. If you generally have low CTRs or Conversion Rates, we recommend a higher minimum to ensure more confidence.

If Facebook is in Learning Mode and you usually have high Conversion Rates, then we recommend waiting the couple of days for the Campaign to exit Learning Mode before making a decision. Though, we don’t stick to this too strictly. Unfortunately, as with all things advertising, it’s all contextual.

Thank you for reading our audience selection mini-guide (in our series Facebook Advertising series). If you’ve landed here and would like to get the rest of the series, please subscribe here (or below). As mentioned, there’s also a mini-glossary at the bottom of the post!

Mini Glossary

Impressions — the number of times an ad has been seen (counts multiple views by the same person)

Reach Size — the number of people that are being shown an ad

Campaign — the grouping of Ad Sets, usually indicates targeting and/or Creative direction

Ad Set — the grouping of Ad Units within a Campaign, usually indicates a sub-target within the Campaign and/or Creative direction

Ad Unit — the image, copy, and/or video combination that’s displayed as an individual Ad Unit

Creative — Individual pieces of an Ad Unit (i.e. image, copy, and/or video)

CTR — the number of clicks over the number of unique impressions