Facebook’s new ad pricing feature is a nifty addition to its advertising platform. It is essentially an automated calculator that gives advertisers and agencies the option of defining their return on investment (ROI) by decoupling costs from performance data.
Costs are firmly tied to clicks, impressions, or interactions with posts in paid promotions, but with the pricing ads tool, advertisers can define success as a range rather than a single figure. They simply enter what they’d be willing to pay for target actions (such as app installs) within a set timeframe and select an acceptable cost range based on campaign objectives.
The system will then evaluate and optimize ad campaigns against this goal, running them until it calculates that a range has been met or that the budget has run out. The advertiser’s ROI is automatically updated in real-time to reflect how much they are willing to pay for the target action, and if necessary, they can change their bid based on this data.
In theory, the pricing ads tool is a handy addition as it gives advertisers more control over their campaigns while allowing them to optimize spend against set objectives – effectively turning the Facebook ad platform into an enterprise-level self-service ad management system (SAMS). However, there are still many questions surrounding the new technology that needs answering before it becomes widely adopted by clients of large agencies such as MEC.