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What is a PPE ad on Facebook ads?

What is a PPE ad on Facebook ads?

Use strategically PPE objectives to build retargeting audiences. Test the waters with our insights on PPE ad costs and effective testing methods.

4 min read
Oct 22, 2020

Most ecommerce companies running Facebook ads are very comfortable with running Facebook ad conversion campaigns, but are they the cheapest way to get conversions?

Conversion campaigns tell Facebook’s algorithm to optimize for conversions. PPE campaigns, on the other hand, tell Facebook’s algorithm to optimize for engagement.

Although engagement is not our ultimate goal in buying Facebook ads, they can be cleverly used to get a lower cost-per-conversion. Here’s how.

Definition of a PPE ad on Facebook

A PPE ad on Facebook ads stands for page post engagement and it’s a campaign objective you can choose when creating a new Facebook ad campaign.

When you run a Facebook campaign with the PPE ads, Facebook will show your ads to people who they think are most likely to engage with your ads.

How to set up a PPE ad on Facebook
How to set up a PPE ad on Facebook

So now that you know what a PPE ad on Facebook is and how it differs from ads in conversion objective campaigns, let’s look at why you’d ever want to use page post engagement Facebook ads.

How should I use PPE ads on Facebook?

When your goal is to generate more purchases, choosing the PPE objective will show your ad to people who are most likely to interact with your ad at a cheap cost, which could overlap with people who are also likely to buy your products.

Here’s how you can take advantage of the PPE Facebook ad.

  1. Use the inexpensive PPE objective to build a retargeting audience of people who interact with your ads and then run a conversion campaign using the audience.
  2. Test running at least 3 ad sets in a PPE campaign with ad creatives you’d normally use in a conversion campaign. Because there could be overlap in people who Facebook think is most likely to engage with your posts and people who are likely to buy your products, it’s possible to come away with a lower cost-per-conversion in a PPE Facebook ad campaign than a conversion campaign.
  3. PPE campaigns generally produce high amounts of engagement - reactions, comments, and clicks. You can use this engagement to collect feedback about new products or what new audiences think of your products inside the comments.

Are Facebook PPE ads better than ads in conversion campaigns?

If you want to get the most amount of purchases at the cheapest cost, it could be possible to get a lower cost-per-conversion by running PPE Facebook ads instead of ads in conversion campaigns, but it’s not typical. Always test.

If you want to collect feedback and comments or if you want to build retargeting audiences, then Facebook ads in the PPE objective are more likely to have a cheaper cost-per-engagement.

How much do PPE ads on Facebook cost?

From our Facebook ad cost research, the average Facebook cost-per-engagement is between $0.07 and $0.10.

From our data, it’s unfortunately impossible to calculate a meaningful cost-per-purchase in page post engagement objective campaigns, because not every using the PPE objective is aiming for purchases.

To get a better understanding of the cost of PPE ads on Facebook for purchases, you’ll just need to test it yourself.

How to test Facebook PPE ads

The hype around PPE ads are in achieving a lower cost-per-conversion for purchases in the PPE objective than in the conversion objective.

To test this for yourself, take your three best converting audiences (if you have Revealbot, use your Top Audiences report to see which ones they are). Then take your best converting ad creatives for those audiences (if you have Revealbot, we’re close to releasing Top Creatives to help you do that).

With your top audiences and your top creatives, create a new PPE objective campaign and inside create a unique ad set for each of your top audiences, then add in your top creatives.

Once you go live, there’s two things you need to keep an eye on:

  1. Monitor the cost-per-purchase (or desired conversion) for each ad. If one begins to perform worse than its cost-per-purchase in the conversion objective campaign, pause it.
  2. Monitor the cost-per-purchase at the ad set level. If the total cost-per-purchase of the ad set is higher than it is in the conversion objective campaign, increase the budgets.

You can easily automate this as well with Facebook automated rules or with Revealbot’s automation platform.

To monitor the ad level performance, you can crease a pause automation if the cost-per-purchase gets too high.

Automatically pause underperforming PPE Facebook ads

To monitor the ad set level, you can automatically increase the budget if the ad set has a cheaper cost-per-purchase than it does in the conversion objective campaign.

Automatically increase budget on high performing PPE Facebook ad sets

With these two automations, you can automate a majority of the testing involved in comparing PPE ads on Facebook to conversion objective ads. You can make your automations even more dynamic using Revealbot’s Google Sheet integration and directly linking and comparing the most recent cost-per-purchase in conversion objective vs the PPE objective.

You can also build off your PPE Facebook ad test with more advanced scaling automations by using Revealbot Strategies.

Scale campaigns with PPE ads and Revealbot automation
With Revealbot's automated rules, you can easily test and scale PPE ads
✓ 14-day free trial ✓ No credit card required ✓ Cancel anytime

Strategy of turning PPE ads into conversion ads

Instead of using PPE ads for conversion off the bat, you can run PPE ads just for the sake of getting engagement on your ads and then reusing those same ads in conversion objective campaigns.

This allows you to keep the engagement of the ads when ran as a PPE ad so when you run it for conversions, your ready-to-buy audiences will see how popular you brand and products are.

You can do this one-by-one manually, or you can use Revealbot's Facebook Post ID export to bulk export all your post IDs at once.

About the author
Reggie Paquette
Reggie Paquette
Marketing Manager, Revealbot
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