Facebook Ads Glossary

A cap you set on the total amount your Meta ad account can spend across all campaigns. Once this limit is reached, all ads in the account stop running until you increase or remove the limit, making it a useful safeguard for controlling overall advertising costs.

A restriction on the number of ad accounts a single user or Business Manager can create within a given timeframe. Meta imposes these limits to prevent spam and abuse, and they typically increase as your account establishes a positive history.

The middle level of Meta's campaign structure where you define your target audience, placement, budget, schedule, and bidding strategy. Each campaign can contain multiple ad sets, allowing you to test different audience segments or delivery settings within a single campaign.

A feature that automatically distributes your campaign budget across ad sets to maximize overall results. Instead of setting individual budgets for each ad set, Meta's algorithm shifts spending toward the best-performing ad sets in real time.

An automated targeting expansion feature that allows Meta to reach people beyond your defined Custom Audience when it's likely to improve performance. It helps extend your reach while still prioritizing users similar to your original audience.

A setting that lets Meta expand your audience beyond your selected detailed targeting options (interests, behaviors, demographics) when doing so may generate better results. It gives Meta flexibility to find conversions outside your specified criteria while staying within your other targeting parameters.

An automated feature that allows Meta to expand your Lookalike Audience beyond the percentage you originally selected when it may improve campaign performance. This gives Meta flexibility to find additional high-value users who share characteristics with your source audience.

A streamlined, automated campaign type designed to drive app installs and in-app events with minimal setup. Meta's machine learning optimizes creative, audience targeting, and placements automatically to maximize results for your mobile app.

A fully automated audience targeting option where Meta uses its AI to find the best people to show your ads to based on your pixel data, conversion history, and ad engagement. You can provide audience suggestions, but Meta treats them as starting points rather than strict parameters.

An ad format that automatically shows relevant products from your catalog to users based on their interests, intent, and past interactions with your website or app. It's particularly effective for retargeting shoppers with items they viewed or for prospecting new customers with personalized product recommendations.

A suite of automatic enhancements Meta applies to your ad creative, such as adjusting brightness, cropping images, or adding music to optimize performance across placements. These optimizations happen dynamically to help each ad variation resonate better with different audiences.

Automatic creative enhancements specifically applied to catalog ads, including adding labels like pricing or free shipping, adjusting aspect ratios, and optimizing product images. These adjustments help make catalog ads more engaging without requiring manual creative work.

A catalog ad feature that automatically displays products in the correct language, currency, and availability based on each user's location. It simplifies running product ads across multiple countries using a single campaign and catalog.

A setting that allows Meta to automatically deliver your ads across all available placements—including Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and Audience Network—based on where they're most likely to perform best. It maximizes your budget efficiency by letting the algorithm allocate spend dynamically.

A highly automated campaign type optimized for e-commerce businesses to drive online sales. It uses machine learning to manage audience targeting, creative optimization, and placements with minimal inputs, requiring only your catalog, budget, and destination.

The technical requirements and guidelines for ad creative on Meta platforms, including image dimensions, video length, file sizes, text limits, and aspect ratios. Following these specs ensures your ads display correctly and aren't rejected during review.

A protocol that allows Meta to measure campaign performance from iOS 14.5+ users who have opted out of tracking, while respecting privacy limitations. It limits you to tracking eight prioritized conversion events per domain and delivers results with some delays and modeling.

A Custom Audience built from people who have taken specific actions within your mobile app, such as making a purchase, reaching a level, or adding items to a cart. It requires the Meta SDK to be integrated with your app to track and capture these in-app events.

The process of determining which ads and interactions led to a conversion or desired action. Attribution helps you understand which campaigns, ad sets, and ads are actually driving results so you can allocate budget effectively.

The time window you select that defines how long after viewing or clicking an ad a conversion can be credited to that ad. Common options include 1-day view, 7-day click, or 1-day click, and your choice affects how Meta optimizes delivery and reports results.

The real-time process Meta uses to determine which ad to show each time there's an opportunity to display an ad to someone. The winner is determined by a combination of your bid, estimated action rates, and ad quality—not just the highest bid.

A situation where multiple ad sets from the same advertiser compete against each other in the same auction because they target overlapping audiences. This can drive up costs and reduce delivery efficiency, which is why Meta may restrict delivery on overlapping ad sets.

The group of people you want to reach with your ads, defined by characteristics like demographics, interests, behaviors, location, or past interactions with your business. Meta offers multiple audience types—including Core, Custom, and Lookalike—to help you target the right users for your campaign goals.

Account-level settings that let you define permanent exclusions for who can see your ads, such as blocking specific locations, age groups, or content categories. These controls apply across all campaigns and help ensure brand safety and compliance with your business requirements.

The problem that occurs when you divide your target audience across too many ad sets, limiting Meta's ability to optimize delivery effectively. Consolidating audiences helps the algorithm learn faster and exit the learning phase more quickly.

A research tool within Meta Ads Manager that provides aggregated information about your audiences, including demographics, interests, and behaviors. It helps you understand your current customers and discover new potential audiences for targeting.

A placement option that extends your ads beyond Facebook and Instagram to third-party apps and websites within Meta's partner network. It can increase reach and lower costs, though advertisers often monitor it separately for quality and performance.

Custom conditions you create to automatically manage your campaigns, such as pausing underperforming ads, adjusting budgets, or receiving notifications when metrics hit certain thresholds. Rules run on a schedule you define and help reduce manual monitoring.

Required disclosure fields for ads about social issues, elections, or politics in the EU that identify who benefits from the ad and who is paying for it. These transparency requirements help users understand the source and intent behind political advertising.

A bid strategy that sets the maximum amount you're willing to pay for a single optimization event, such as a click or conversion. It gives you strict cost control but may limit delivery if your cap is set too low for the competitive auction environment.

The approach you choose for how Meta bids on your behalf in ad auctions, which affects both cost and delivery volume. Options include highest volume, cost per result goal, bid cap, and ROAS goal—each balancing spend efficiency against result volume differently.

A reporting feature in Ads Manager that lets you segment your performance data by dimensions like age, gender, placement, device, or time period. Breakdowns help you identify which segments are driving results and where to optimize.

An audience strategy where you set minimal targeting restrictions—typically just location and age—and let Meta's algorithm find the best users based on your optimization goal and pixel data. It's increasingly effective as Meta's machine learning improves and is often recommended for Advantage+ campaigns.

The amount of money you're willing to spend on a campaign or ad set, set as either a daily limit or a lifetime total for the campaign's duration. Your budget, combined with your bid strategy, determines how aggressively Meta pursues results in the auction.

A centralized platform for managing all your Meta business assets, including ad accounts, Pages, pixels, catalogs, and team permissions. It provides secure access control and is essential for agencies or businesses managing multiple accounts or collaborating with partners.

The method you choose for purchasing ads, either Auction (where you compete in real-time bidding) or Reservation (where you book placements in advance at a fixed price). Most advertisers use Auction for its flexibility, while Reservation is typically used for guaranteed reach and premium placements.

Cost per click—a metric calculated by dividing your total spend by the number of link clicks your ad received. It helps you understand how efficiently you're driving traffic and is useful for comparing performance across ads and campaigns.

Cost per mille, or the cost to deliver 1,000 impressions of your ad. It's a standard metric for measuring and comparing ad costs across platforms and is influenced by factors like audience competition, placement, ad quality, and time of year.

A clickable button on your ad that prompts users to take a specific action, such as Shop Now, Learn More, Sign Up, or Download. Choosing the right CTA helps set user expectations and can improve click-through rates by aligning with your campaign objective.

The top level of Meta's advertising structure where you set your overall objective, such as awareness, traffic, or conversions. Each campaign contains one or more ad sets and serves as the foundation for organizing and measuring your advertising efforts.

The primary goal you select when creating a campaign, which tells Meta what result you want to achieve—such as awareness, traffic, engagement, leads, app promotion, or sales. Your objective determines which optimization and delivery options are available and how Meta bids in auctions.

A cap on the total amount a specific campaign can spend over its entire lifetime, regardless of daily budget settings. Once reached, the campaign stops delivering until you raise or remove the limit, providing an extra layer of budget control.

An ad format that displays multiple images or videos in a single ad unit, each with its own headline, description, and link. Users swipe or click through the cards, making it ideal for showcasing multiple products, features, or telling a sequential story.

Audiences built from people who have interacted with items in your product catalog, such as viewing products, adding to cart, or purchasing. They're commonly used for retargeting campaigns to re-engage shoppers with products they've already shown interest in.

A measurement model that credits a conversion to an ad when someone clicked on that ad before converting within your selected attribution window. It's generally considered more reliable than view attribution because it indicates active engagement with your ad.

A metric that counts every click on your ad, including link clicks, clicks to view media, clicks on profiles, reactions, comments, shares, and other interactive elements. It's broader than link clicks and useful for understanding overall engagement with your ad.

A reporting feature that lets you view your campaign results side-by-side using different attribution windows, such as 1-day click versus 7-day click. It helps you understand how attribution settings affect reported conversions and make more informed decisions about optimization.

A standard event that tracks when someone views a key page on your website, typically a product page or important content page. It's a commonly used mid-funnel metric that indicates interest and is often used as an optimization event for prospecting campaigns.

Actions that people take that are valuable to your business, such as purchases, sign-ups, leads, or app installs. In Meta Ads, you track conversions using the pixel, Conversions API, or SDK, and they serve as the foundation for measuring campaign success and optimizing delivery.

A server-side tracking method that sends conversion data directly from your server to Meta, bypassing browser limitations like ad blockers and iOS privacy restrictions. It's recommended to use alongside the pixel for more accurate tracking and improved campaign optimization.

A bid strategy where you tell Meta the average cost you want to pay per optimization event, and the algorithm aims to achieve that average over time. It provides more cost predictability than highest volume while allowing more delivery flexibility than bid cap.

An audience you create from your own data sources, such as customer lists, website visitors, app users, or people who engaged with your content on Meta. Custom Audiences let you target people who already have a relationship with your business for retargeting or exclusion purposes.

User-defined conversion events created by specifying URL rules or filtering standard events by parameters, without requiring additional pixel code. They're useful for tracking specific actions like visits to a thank-you page or purchases of a particular product category.

A cap on how much your ad account can spend in a single day across all active campaigns. It's set at the account level by Meta based on your billing history and trust, and can be increased by contacting support or building account history.

A buying option or metric that limits your ad to being shown to each person no more than once per day. It's useful for awareness campaigns where you want broad exposure without oversaturating individual users with repeated impressions.

An attribution type that credits a conversion when someone watches a skippable video ad for at least 10 seconds (or 97% if shorter) without clicking, then converts within 1 day. It captures users who showed meaningful interest in your video content but didn't click through directly.

An approximate count of how many people fall within your defined targeting parameters, displayed when building an ad set. It helps you gauge whether your audience is too narrow for effective delivery or too broad for efficient spending.

A Custom Audience created from people who have responded to or interacted with your Facebook Events. It's useful for targeting attendees of past events, people who expressed interest, or excluding them from future promotions.

A metric that counts the number of people who responded to your Facebook Event with Interested or Going after seeing your ad. It's the primary success metric for campaigns using the Event Responses objective.

A point-and-click interface that lets you set up pixel events on your website without adding code manually. You select buttons or page elements to track, and Meta generates the necessary event tracking—ideal for marketers without developer resources.

A Custom Audience built from people who have interacted with your Facebook Page, such as those who liked it, engaged with posts, clicked your CTA button, or sent messages. It's useful for retargeting warm audiences who already know your brand.

A piece of JavaScript code you install on your website that tracks visitor actions, enables conversion tracking, and builds audiences for retargeting. It sends data to Meta about events like page views, add-to-carts, and purchases to optimize ad delivery and measure results.

The average number of times each person saw your ad during a given time period, calculated by dividing impressions by reach. Monitoring frequency helps you identify audience fatigue and determine when to refresh creative or expand targeting.

A control that limits how many times your ad is shown to the same person within a specified time period. It's available for Reach and Awareness objectives and helps prevent ad fatigue while maximizing unique audience exposure.

A bid strategy that optimizes for the highest possible conversion value or ROAS rather than the highest number of conversions. Meta's algorithm prioritizes showing ads to users most likely to make high-value purchases, requiring value-based optimization to be set up.

The default bid strategy that aims to get the maximum number of optimization events for your budget without a cost cap. It gives Meta full flexibility in auctions to drive as many results as possible, though cost per result may vary.

The total number of times your ad was displayed on screen, counting each view even if the same person saw it multiple times. It's a fundamental reach metric used to calculate CPM and frequency.

A Custom Audience built from people who have interacted with your Instagram business account, including those who visited your profile, engaged with posts or ads, or sent direct messages. It enables retargeting users who have shown interest in your brand on Instagram.

A metric that counts when someone clicks your ad link and successfully loads the destination page, as measured by the pixel. It's more accurate than link clicks because it filters out people who clicked but left before the page loaded.

A Custom Audience created from people who interacted with your Meta lead generation forms, such as those who opened the form or submitted their information. It's useful for nurturing leads or excluding people who already converted.

A total budget amount you set for the entire duration of an ad set or campaign, rather than a daily limit. Meta paces spending across the scheduled flight dates and may spend more on high-opportunity days and less on others to optimize results.

The number of clicks on links within your ad that direct people to destinations on or off Meta, such as your website, app store, or Instant Experience. It's a more focused metric than Clicks (All) and commonly used to measure traffic-driving performance.

An audience Meta creates by finding users who share similar characteristics and behaviors with a source audience you provide, such as your customers or website visitors. You select a percentage size (1-10%), with smaller percentages being more similar to your source.

A metric that counts all actions people take involving your Facebook Page and its posts, including likes, comments, shares, and clicks. It's used as both a campaign objective and a performance metric for measuring content resonance.

The specific outcome you want Meta to optimize for within your chosen campaign objective, such as maximizing link clicks, landing page views, or conversions. It determines how Meta's algorithm bids and delivers your ads to achieve the best results.

Additional data points attached to pixel events that provide more context, such as product IDs, purchase values, currency, or content categories. Parameters enable more granular tracking, dynamic ads, value-based optimization, and detailed reporting.

Specific actions tracked by the Facebook Pixel when visitors interact with your website, including standard events like Purchase, Add to Cart, and Lead, or custom events you define. Events are the foundation for conversion tracking, optimization, and audience building.

The specific location where your ad appears across Meta's platforms, such as Facebook Feed, Instagram Stories, Reels, Messenger, or Audience Network. You can let Meta choose placements automatically or manually select specific ones based on your creative and strategy.

A metric that counts all interactions with a specific post promoted as an ad, including reactions, comments, shares, clicks, and video views. It measures how well your content resonates with your audience and can indicate creative effectiveness.

A bid strategy where you set a target return on ad spend, and Meta optimizes delivery to achieve that ratio of conversion value to ad spend. It requires value-based optimization to be enabled and works best with sufficient conversion data for the algorithm to learn.

The total number of unique people who saw your ad at least once during a given time period. Unlike impressions, reach counts each person only once regardless of how many times they were exposed to your ad.

A delivery optimization setting that prioritizes showing your ad to as many unique people as possible within your target audience. It's ideal for awareness campaigns where broad exposure matters more than driving specific actions.

A buying method that lets you book ad placements in advance at a fixed CPM with guaranteed reach and predictable delivery. It's used for planned campaigns requiring assured visibility, such as product launches or major events, and offers more control over frequency than auction buying.

A reusable audience you create and save in Ads Manager using demographic, interest, behavior, and location targeting criteria. Saved Audiences streamline campaign setup by allowing you to quickly apply consistent targeting across multiple ad sets.

The process of increasing your ad spend or expanding your reach while maintaining or improving performance. Effective scaling typically involves gradual budget increases, audience expansion, or adding new creative to avoid disrupting the algorithm's learning.

A mandatory classification for ads related to credit, employment, housing, social issues, elections, or politics that restricts certain targeting options to prevent discrimination. You must declare the appropriate category before creating these ads, and failure to do so violates Meta's policies.

A feature that lets you test different versions of your campaign variables—such as audience, creative, placement, or delivery optimization—against each other with statistically separated audiences. Meta determines a winner based on performance, helping you make data-driven optimization decisions.

A Meta initiative that provides industry-specific campaign templates, creative guidance, and best practices optimized for particular business types like e-commerce, lead generation, or app promotion. These frameworks help advertisers implement proven strategies without starting from scratch.

A video metric that counts the number of times your video was played to completion or for at least 15 seconds, whichever comes first. It's used as an optimization event for video campaigns and indicates meaningful video engagement beyond just starting to watch.

A Custom Audience built from people who have watched your videos on Facebook or Instagram, with options to segment by watch duration such as 3 seconds, 10 seconds, or 95% completion. It's valuable for retargeting users who have shown interest through video consumption.

A measurement model that credits a conversion to an ad when someone saw the ad but didn't click, then converted within your selected view attribution window (typically 1 day). It captures the influence of ad exposure on conversions that don't involve a direct click.

A Custom Audience created from people who have visited your website or taken specific actions there, tracked via the Facebook Pixel or Conversions API. It enables retargeting based on pages visited, time spent, or specific events triggered.

A more refined Website Custom Audience filtered by specific pixel events and parameters, such as people who added a particular product category to cart or spent over a certain amount. It allows highly targeted retargeting based on exact user behaviors rather than just page visits.