Facebook to introduce ad limits per page starting in February 2021

Facebook this week announced it is introducing ad limits per page on Facebook Ads Manager. According to Facebook, there are advertisers running too many ads at the same time, and Facebook will start to enforce ad limits from February 2021 through Summer 2021.

Facebook says 4 in 10 running ads fail to exit the learning phase, and the budget is spent before the delivery system can optimize performance. Facebook’s learning phase is the period when the delivery system has to learn about an ad set. During the learning phase, Facebook’s delivery system explores the best way to deliver the ad set – so performance is less stable and cost per action (CPA) is usually worse. Ad sets exit the learning phase as soon as performance stabilises (usually after around 50 conversions).

New ad limits are per page and not per ad account

According to Facebook, advertisers exceeding the ad limits won’t be able to run more ads or publish edits to existing ads until they reduce the ad volume below the limit. The ad limit counts all ads that are running or in review for a Page. Each dynamic creative ad, automatic placements ad or dynamic ad counts as one ad.

Facebook clarifies that the ad limit is per Page and not per ad account, business or user. Page admins can set ad limits for partners and people in the ad limits per Page tool. Page admins will see the maximum number of ads they can run for the Page in the Ad limits per Page tab in Account overview of Ads Manager.

Advertisers can always create more pages, but Facebook is advising against saying that might hurt the performance across Pages due to the competition in the same auctions.

The new Facebook ad limits per page

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

The four limit tiers have to goal to encourage advertisers of different sizes to use an ad volume per Page that optimizes their performance, Facebook says.

Best practices for ad management

Facebook is advising advertisers to combine ad sets, as this will help to get the conversions and exit the learning phase sooner.

Advertisers should also decrease ads per ad set. Facebook says advertisers should test ads in ways that are replicable and more effective, finding the best creatives before scale. Facebook is recommending six or fewer creatives per ad set.

Facebook also recommends to turn off ads that aren’t delivering, or that are labeled as Learning Limited. According to Facebook, active ads that haven’t delivered in a few days are less likely to win auctions in the future.