The DEFINITIVE GUIDE to How Facebook Ads ACTUALLY WORK

Lets deep dive into how Ads Actually Work…
Sadly, the vast majority of marketers fundamentally misunderstand some very basic principles, and that is why they struggle.
Let’s fix that!



Post IDs are a Webpage

Facebook Ads are referenced by their Post ID.
Each Post ID is it’s own webpage within Facebook. When you make an ad, all you’re really doing is building webpages, and then spending money to show that page to more people.
The Facebook news feed is actually a rich media listing of many webpages, same with Instagram, and every other social media platform.
Facebook is measuring the CTR, the Stickiness, the Bounce Rate, the Engagement Rate; the Time on Site, and the behavior that occurs after someone is shown each webpage (webpages being the content of the feed, posts & reels etc)

Facebook, just like all other oCPM platforms, analyze each users behavior against every single webpage within the Facebook app/site. The Machine Learning is built around showing users content that they want to see, and engage with, based on literally TRILLIONS of data points, and it does this in real time.

Your post, your reel, your TikTok, your YouTube video, your Pin etc… are all just webpages within each respective platforms website. The social media platform is built around giving you dynamic feed of webpages that you want to see, based on your behavior both on the site, and on other sites, plus how you behave in the real world.

The organic feed of every platform, runs on the exact same logic as the Paid Media engine of the platform… the only difference, is in paid media, you pay for that attention.

Your CPM is based on how desirable your content is, to the audience you are targeting. This is yet another reason why “Broad” is the only targeting you need!

Every ad is a Post ID. The data of how this Post ID is received by the users of that platform is called “the learnings”. The “Learnings” happen at the Ad Level… that’s stone cold fact!


Facebook Targeting Explained, the Ads do the Targeting

Because of the data each Post ID has, paid or organic… the platform knows how people will respond to it. The more data a post has, the higher the accuracy and confidence of this knowledge and decision making from the Machine Learning. Just like with Organic Reach, Facebook is able to use the data that the Ads have (because all of it is just Post IDs, which are webpages) to determine who else to show your content to.

Every post can determine who “looks like” those who have already had a platform level desirable experience, one that meets Facebook’s business objective of attention and retention. All content then finds other users who “look like that” to be shown to in users platform experience. If this kinda sounds like a “Lookalike” audience, your right, it is… that exactly what this is.

Every Post ID curates it’s own Lookalike audience, and then competes in the algorithm to be shown to the users within that audience, based on merit.

When we pay for ads, we are forcing our content into the algorithmic feeds of users… our CPMs come as a ramification of that


Dynamic Ads in Facebook Ads Manager

Dynamic Ads collate data at the Post ID level, just like every other ad. The biggest difference is that webpage itself has dynamic elements. Facebook is letting the webpage that is being promoted respond and adapt dynamically to what each user wants to see. This allows the platform to see every datapoint, from every ad iteration, at scale and use that to make decisions.

The purpose of dynamic ads is to use the algorithm to develop webpages that are most directly a& algorithmically aligned to user experience. Using machine learning, to conduct market research at scale, to develop high value and high confidence assets... will beat human guess work EVERY SINGLE TIME, if its done well.

There are 3 SIMPLE RULES to make Dynamic Creative work for you

1: Don't have more than 3 options per element
Every choice you make should be binary, eliminate human prejudice

2: Run DCTs until you are confident in the ability to project the outcome of the test
If you don't know the efficiency that will come from the ad, by definition, the test is not complete

3: Extract the Post IDs of the best Estimated Action Rate ads
Hit "Preview Facebook Post with Comments" and grab the post ID of the top ads by hitting the timestamp