Facebook To Limit The Number Of Digital Ads Businesses Can Run At Once

Facebook, one of the busiest digital advertising vendors in the world, is planning to limit the number of ads businesses can run across its platform at once.

“In the past, advertisers seeking to personalize ads did so by creating a high volume of ads in hopes that the right ads would be seen by the right people,” Facebook said, per AdWeek. Now, it wants marketers to deploy fewer ads, while using its targeting tools to ensure those missives end up in front of the intended audience.

“Running too many ads at once can hurt performance,” the company added in a note about the new limits. It explained that its artificial intelligence-driven targeting systems learn every time an ad is served, so when a business sends out a deluge of marketing, each individual ad is delivered fewer times, giving systems fewer opportunities to learn how to optimize.

The limits, which Facebook will begin enforcing Feb. 16, impose restrictions based on how much businesses have spent on Facebook marketing per month in the last year.

Facebook refers to marketers as “Pages,” so to be clear, this change won’t affect how many ads users see when they load a page on the Facebook website; it will simply change how many ads any one organization is permitted to run simultaneously.

Per Facebook, the upcoming limits are:

• Small to medium sized Pages (advertising less than $100K in their highest spending month in the last 12 months): 250 ads
• Medium to large sized Pages (advertising less than $1M in their highest spending month in the last 12 months): 1,000 ads
• Larger Pages (advertising less than $10M in their highest spending month in the last 12 months): 5,000 ads
• Largest Pages (advertising $10M or more in their highest spending month in the last 12 months: 20,000 ads

Graham Mudd, Facebook’s VP of product marketing, told AdWeek that a “fairly small percentage” of marketers are currently exceeding these limits.

If marketers go over the new limits after Feb. 16, they will be unable to run new ads or edit existing ads until they decrease their volume. Businesses could get around the limits (seemingly without punishment) by creating more than one Page for their organization, Facebook acknowledges, but doing so “might hurt your own performance,” it warns.

Page owners will begin seeing Ad Limits per Page tools appear in their backend Ad Manager over the next few weeks.