Facebook advertising trends that mattered in 2020

Facebook advertising was still hard to ignore in 2020. 67% of social advertisers called it their most effective social platform, while a 2019 quarterly report reported 28% year-over-year growth in ad revenue.

Those numbers are historical, and so is the advice below. This is a snapshot of the formats and campaign controls that looked important at the start of 2020, when Facebook reported 1.67 billion daily and 2.5 billion monthly users.

Video content

Video already had a large role in Facebook campaigns. In Buffer’s 2019 report, 81% of surveyed businesses used Facebook to publish video, compared with 62% for YouTube.

The practical detail was sound: 85% of Facebook video was watched without it. Facebook reported that captions could increase viewing time by as much as 12%. A video ad needed to communicate before anyone reached for the volume control.

Mobile-first

Mobile generated 93% of Facebook’s advertising revenue. Fors Marsh tests also suggested that people recalled mobile-feed content after very brief exposure, while average attention per News Feed item was 1.7 seconds on mobile and 2.5 seconds on desktop.

That made “mobile-first” more than a layout preference. The opening frame, text size, crop, and call to action all had to work on a phone and work quickly.

Messenger ads

Messenger had 1.3 billion active users, making it an attractive route from an ad into a conversation. Sponsored messages came with an important restriction: a business could send them only to people who had already started a conversation.

That made Messenger a better fit for warm audiences and customer follow-up than for indiscriminate outreach. Facebook presented the format as a way to drive conversions and sales, but the personal setting meant the message still needed restraint.

Search ads

Search-result ads offered a way to reach people already looking for a product or topic. The placement could be included through Automatic Placements or selected manually.

It was not keyword advertising in the Google Ads sense. Advertisers could not target the exact phrase someone searched for; Facebook instead used signals that included terms appearing on the business Page.

Instant experiences

Instant Experiences, previously called Canvas, were full-screen mobile pages that opened from an ad. They could combine video, photos, carousels, product tags, and tilt-to-pan images without first sending the visitor to a normal website.

The format was useful when a landing page needed a richer product story and fast in-app loading. I would not use it by default, though: it created another experience to build and maintain, and the campaign still needed a clear path to its actual goal.

Stories ads

In an Ipsos survey commissioned by Facebook, 62% of respondents said Stories made them more interested in a brand or product, and more than half said Stories led them to make more online purchases.

The format also matched how people held their phones: vertically, roughly 90% of the time. Reusing a landscape feed ad inside a full-screen vertical placement wasted that advantage. Stories needed their own crop, pacing, and safe space for interface controls.

Campaign budget optimization

Campaign budget optimisation (CBO) let advertisers set one campaign-level budget and allow Facebook to distribute it across ad sets in real time. It was available across campaign objectives and made the most sense when several ad sets competed for the same budget.

CBO could reduce manual adjustments and some returns to the learning phase. The trade-off was control: if each ad set needed a guaranteed spend, automatic distribution was not always the right choice.

Placement optimization

Facebook recommended Automatic Placements so its delivery system could choose among eligible placements on Facebook, Instagram, Audience Network, and Messenger. The aim was to find lower-cost opportunities that still matched the campaign objective.

I would usually start there, then check the breakdown rather than assume every placement contributes equally. Automatic delivery works best when the creative has been prepared for the different formats it may enter.

The common thread in 2020 was clear: mobile formats were taking more space, while Facebook was asking advertisers to hand more budget and placement decisions to its delivery system. The automation could save time, but it did not replace checking where the money went and whether the creative suited the placement.