Placement
Also known as: Ad Placement
A placement is a specific location where your ad can appear — Facebook feed, Instagram Stories, Reels, Messenger, or the Audience Network.
What it actually means
Placements are the individual surfaces across Meta's ecosystem where ads run: feeds, Stories, Reels, in-stream video, search results, Messenger, and third-party apps via the Audience Network. Each has its own format demands (vertical video for Stories and Reels, square or landscape for feeds) and its own cost profile. Meta's default, Advantage+ placements, spreads delivery across all of them and generally finds the cheapest available attention. Manual placement selection makes sense mainly when creative only fits certain formats or when a placement demonstrably underperforms. The common mistake is running one horizontal image everywhere and quietly wasting the vertical placements' inventory.
Let Meta use automatic placements, but supply both square and vertical versions of your creative — otherwise your ad shows up letterboxed and amateurish in Stories and Reels, where much of the cheap local reach lives.
Related terms
Reels are short, vertical, full-screen videos on Instagram and Facebook, and a fast-growing placement for native-feeling video ads.
Stories ads are full-screen vertical ads that appear between users' Stories on Instagram and Facebook, lasting a few seconds before auto-advancing.
Ad creative is the visual and written content of an ad — the image or video, the headline, and the copy that capture attention and communicate the offer.
CPM is the cost to show your ad 1,000 times, calculated as total spend divided by impressions, multiplied by 1,000.
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