And stop wasting budget on unnecessary tests.

Finally, you can predict the cost of your Facebook campaigns with the new Facebook campaign planner. Originally made for brand campaigns, but can definitely help in assessing direct response campaigns as well.

One of the great benefits of the planner is that you can create multiple variations, and then choose the one that looks more effective. Choose different settings in each variation, and get their traffic price predictions. Combine that with powerful data about your past marketing performance, such as conversion rates by each campaign, users behavior, and seeing your optimizing opportunities as Oribi offers, and you’re on the right way for killer marketing results.

How to get started with the Campaign Planner?

Step 1 – Access the Campaign Planner

Click on the top menu button of the Ads Manager or Power Editor, and open the “All Tools” list. You will find the Campaign Planner under the section “Plan”.

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Step 2 – Name your plan and variations

The second step in planning your campaign is naming the plan. Make sure to use a logical name and not just “plan 1”, so you can use it again in the future and remember what you have used it for. As for the variations, it is recommended to name them by the settings you are using in it.

Step 3 – Choose budget, reach, and schedule

The first part of the Campaign Planner is a dynamic banner, that will display the CPM and reach prediction according to your plan settings (which will be defined next).

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All you need to set here is how much you will spend on this campaign, or what is the reach you are aiming to get. Each of them will dynamically change by the other. For example, I defined a budget of $10,000, and the reach 1,198,951. If I’ll change the reach for 1,000,000, my budget will dynamically reduce to $7,665.55.

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tip Tip: Wait with changing your original budget or reach until you finish setting up the rest of the plan. It will keep changing dynamically with each setting you will add.

Step 4 – set the frequency of your planned campaign

As a Facebook marketer, you probably know that frequency is one of the most important parameters in your campaigns. When the frequency gets too high (like 2.0 for example) it means your ads keep reaching the same people, and your campaign becomes less effective.

In your plan, you can set the frequency, and see what is the required budget and CPM to reach it. As explained before, the first banner that displays the CPM and reach will dynamically change by your settings. Choose the frequency you wish to get and plan will be set by it. For example, I chose to plan by a frequency of 1 in every 7 days.

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Step 5 – Set your target audience

Set your target audience exactly as you do when creating an ad set.  Choose locations, age, gender, custom audience and all the other audience settings you know from the Ads Manager and Power Editor.

tip Tip: Choose a different target audience in each variation, and then compare the difference audiences by comparing variations.

Step 6 – Choose the placements you will show your ads on

As in target audience, this is exactly how you choose placements when setting up and ad set on the Ads Manager or Power Editor. Choose between the different placements and devices in your campaign plan.

tip Tip: You can create different variations with the same target audience, but different placements, and compare the predicted reach and CPM.

Step 7 – Choose the campaign objective and ad formats

Plan your campaign, by the objective you mean to use. Currently, only a few of the objectives are available on the Campaign Planner.

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After choosing the objective, you will also be required to choose the ad types you will use.

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Step 8 – Review your plan

That’s it, you are done creating your first plan variation. All you need to do now is review it. The top banner will now display your predicted reach and CPM according to your settings:

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In addition to that, you will see the full prediction of your campaign on the right side of the screen.

First, you will see the percentage of the audience you will reach out of your target audience, and the number of impressions you will get based on the frequency you chose.

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Next, there is the frequency per person, which display how many times people will see your ad according to your frequency set. In this case, it is at a frequency of 3. As you can see, 34% of the people will see it one time, only 12% will see it twice, and 54% will see it 3 times.

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Right below it is the placement distribution. See how your ads will be distributed by placements.

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And last is the spend by day, that will show you how your budget will spread over the schedule you chose.

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Step 9 – Create another variation of the plan and compare them

Now that you have your first variation, you can create more variations and compare them. The variations can be different by targeting, schedule, placements or whatever you want to compare.

To compare between variations, simply create another variation in the same plan, and all the data you reviewed in your first variation, will now be a comparison between the two variations:

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tip Tip: Treat the variations as A/B testing. Make only one change in each variation to know exactly what made it better or worst. For example, change only the placements, or the audience targeting, but not both at once. This way you will know exactly what made one version better than the other.

Final piece of advice

The Campaign Planner is not 100% accurate in predicting the results of your campaign. Obviously, there are other factors that will affect your campaign performance, but it can definitely help you understand how different settings of your ad sets can get you different results, even before you are actually testing them by spending your budget.

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