You may have heard the news that from February 2021, Facebook will limit the number of active ads per page. It might seem daunting at first, but in reality, too many ads are not always good for the results, so the limitation could also have potential for improvement. If you're interested to know what exactly determines the number of ads you can display, or how you can make the most of the situation, read on!
Why is a limit necessary and what does it mean exactly?
Facebook has recently made significant changes to its advertising terms and conditions: first it removed the 20% rule for creatives, and now from February it will only allow a limited number of active ads to run on certain pages. One of the main reasons for this is that Facebook believes that a large number of ads can destroy results, so the aim is to improve the overall performance of the adverts. In practice, this means the following:
- Reduce the number of ads that remain in the learning phase: if you run too many ads at once, fewer of your ad series can exit the learning phase. This is actually the period when Facebook's ad serving system does not yet have enough information about where and to whom an ad should be served, so it cannot yet optimise ad performance. The more times an ad appears, the better the optimisation, but if you run a lot of ads at once, they will appear less often.
- Cost-effectiveness: once Facebook's ad serving system can optimise performance - which is achieved by moving out of the learning phase mentioned above - the ad will already spend a smaller share of the budget.
Who is affected and how?
The ad limit takes into account all active and under control ads on a given page. How many ads your site can run in the future depends on the size of your company and how much you have spent per month for the last 1 year. Based on this, there are 4 categories of sites:
● Small and medium sized sites (in 2019: less than $100,000 maximum monthly spend) → 250 active ads
● Medium to large sites (last 1 year: maximum monthly spend less than $1 million) → 1000 active ads
● Larger sites (last 1 year: maximum monthly spend less than $10 million) → 5000 active ads
● Largest sites (last 1 year: $10 million or more maximum monthly spend) → 20 000 active ads
In this context, it is important to note that since these are very high costs, the limit will mainly affect larger or international advertisers.
Visuals are not affected, so advertisers can still use a wide range of creative content regardless of company size. It's also good news that autoplaced, dynamic creative and dynamic ads count as one, regardless of the number of visuals.
How to know how many ads you can run
In the related section of the Business Manager, you can see which category your site falls into, and how many ads you can run. You can find this function under the tool called Ad limits per page in the menu. Here you can also find out the exact dates when the limit will come into effect.
It is also important to note that the advertising limit is per page, not per user/account. The administrator of a page has the ability to control the number of ads from external accounts by setting additional ad limits for partners. This can also be done by the administrator under the tool called Ad limits per page.
If you think about the possible loopholes related to advertising limits (whether it's creating multiple pages or multiple advertising accounts for one page), you could easily endanger your own performance, as you will have to manage multiple accounts at the same time, which requires extra effort and energy, and you also have to take into account that your pages will be bidding/competing against each other, which will incur extra costs.
Summary
You should start monitoring your site and your ads now, so that you are not caught by surprise when the limit comes into force. If you're curious about tips for setting up successful Facebook campaigns, send us a message, we are happy to help!
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