Spending money on advertising on Facebook, Instagram and Audience Network is related to your budget, how we deliver your ad and what you choose to be charged for.

Budgets

It's important to know the difference between your budget and your amount spent:

• Budget: The amount of money you're willing to pay to have ads from your ad set shown over the period you set it to run. You set a budget for each ad set you create.

  Remember: You're not buying ads or the ability to show ads. You're telling us how much you're willing to spend on us showing your ads to people in your target audience who can get you the results you want.

• Amount spent: The amount you actually end up paying (how much money was used from the budget) on your ad set. Ideally, your ad sets will spend most, if not all, of their budgets. (If they're not, check out these tips.)

It's also important to know the difference between daily and lifetime budgets.

• Daily Budget: The average amount you're willing to spend on an ad set every day. Learn more.
• Lifetime Budget: The amount you're willing to spend over the duration of an ad set.

Important:

• You can't switch an ad set's budget type from one to another after it's been created. However, you can duplicate an existing ad set
• Each ad set will have a separate budget, so keep this in mind if you have more than one active ad set.

Delivery

When we say we've delivered your ad, we mean we've shown it to someone in your target audience. We strive to deliver your ad to the people most likely to get you the result your ad set is optimized for at the cheapest cost. There are two delivery types you can choose for your ad set: standard and accelerated. Your choice affects how we spend your budget.

Important: You can only choose accelerated delivery if you're using manual (not automatic) bidding. Learn more about bidding.

Standard Delivery

If you choose standard delivery, we'll deliver your ads (and, by extension, spend your budget) evenly over the course of your campaign. We call this pacing. We recommend this option in most cases.

Here's more information on how pacing works and why we do it:

What is pacing?

The guiding principal of our pacing system is to provide you with as much value as possible over the course of your campaign within the constraints of your budget and the dynamics of the market. In practical terms, this means we try to spend your budget evenly throughout your campaign, and may lower your bid when there are lots cheap opportunities available in order to get the most out of your budget.

Why do you do it?

We designed our system like this because it's the best way to maximize the number of results you get while minimizing cost. If we entered your ad sets into as many auctions as possible as quickly as possible, we'd spend your budget before being able to take advantage of other, cheaper opportunities that are likely to come along later in your campaign. That could mean fewer overall results. If we entered your full bid into every auction, even if a lower bid would've been enough to win, we could be wasting your money.

Example Scenarios

Here's a generalized illustration of how this works:

Each line represents an ad set with a $15 (or whatever your currency is) budget:

• The gray line is an example of spending your budget too aggressively. (This could also represent accelerated delivery, which in some cases may be preferable - read more below.)
• The blue line is an example of spending your budget optimally.
• The red line is an example of spending your budget too conservatively.

The gray and blue ad sets both spend their budgets, but the gray one gets fewer results because its bid isn't lowered and it finishes spending its budget well before the end of the of the ad set's run time. This leads to fewer results that cost more. The blue ad set has its bid lowered when appropriate (and is thus able to to get cheaper results than the gray ad set) and spends its budget more evenly, which leads to more results that cost less. The red line lowers its bid too much and doesn't enter enough auctions. It ends up with few results and budget left over.

Here's a more specific example:

Say it's near the end of your campaign and you only have $10 of your budget left. Your bid is set at $5. Suddenly, lots of people in your target audience go on Facebook, creating lots opportunities to show your ad and get results. The cost of the results ranges from $1 to $5. If we entered your full bid into every auction during this time, you might only be able to get 2 results out of the remainder of your budget. However, if we lowered your bid to $1, you could get 10 or more.

Alternatively, if there aren't many relatively cheap results available at a given time, we will enter your full bid into auctions to ensure you're getting the results available. In other words, the bid we enter is context-sensitive. Whatever the circumstances of the moment might be, our system is working to get you the most results for the cheapest cost while using your full budget by the end of your campaign.

When do you use pacing?

We may pace your ad set when it's using standard delivery, on track to spend its full budget and/or there are many opportunities for results available.

This means that if you're using accelerated delivery, we don't use pacing. In fact, accelerated delivery could be described as delivery without pacing. (Learn more about delivery types.)

It also means that if your ad set is not on track to spend its full budget by the end of the day (also known as "under-delivering"), we don't pace it.

Summary

We try to spend your budget evenly over the course of your campaign. As part of this, we may lower your bid at certain times to maximize value. While you may be familiar with other online advertising platforms that don't use pacing, we feel it's the best way for you to get the maximum value from your ads.

Learn more about how pacing affects your cost per result, and how to avoid common mistakes when increasing your budget.

Accelerated Delivery

If you choose accelerated delivery, we'll deliver your ads (and, by extension, spend your budget) as quickly as possible. This means we're prioritizing speed over efficiency when choosing who to show your ads to, and when. While this option may prevent you from getting the most purely statistical value from your ads, there could be contextual value that makes it worth it. For example, if your campaign is extremely time-sensitive, there might be added value for you in getting all your ads out during a specific and short time period. In such a case, the trade-off could be worth it.

Charges

You also choose what result you want to be charged for (ex: 1,000 impressions or a link click) for each ad set.

We charge money from your ad set's budget only when this result occurs (ex: we show an ad 1,000 times or an ad's link is clicked).

To learn more about how we calculate what we charge you, read our article on bidding and ad auctions.