Note: "Auction Competition" is a tab that you can access in Delivery Insights. It's being tested at the moment, so you may not have access to it.

When you run an ad set, it gets entered into many auctions with other ad sets that are trying to reach the same target audience. The winner of each auction gets to show an ad to someone in that target audience. Some times of day/week/month/year are more competitive than others. Competition means that many advertisers are trying to reach the same people and are willing to pay more to do so. When this happens, you may have trouble spending your budget or have to pay a higher cost per result. To get a sense of how auction competition is affecting ad set performance, use the Auction competition tab to see how it affected the auctions that you were closest to being able to win.

What are the metrics involved?

Delivery Insights provides the following metrics to help you understand the impact that auction competition is having on your ad sets:

• Bid: The target maximum or average amount that you wanted to pay per result (in other words, the bid you set for your ad set). This may appear as "Auto" if you used automatic bidding. Bids are one of the most powerful tools that you have for improving ad performance, so it's important to bear in mind what your bid was when developing a performance improvement strategy.
• Paced auction bid: The bid amount that we entered in the auction, as determined by the pacing of Facebook's delivery system.

  If you used manual bidding for your ad set, the Paced Auction Bid can be different because the delivery system sometimes bids less than your manual bid in order to spend your budget at an even pace throughout your campaign and get you the most cost-effective results. If your Paced Auction Bid and your Bid are very close, it could mean that you're not spending your budget fast enough for your campaign's schedule, so our system is raising your Paced Auction Bid to be more competitive and prevent under-delivery.

  Notes:

  • If you changed your bid over the course of the day, we won't be able to show you Paced Auction Bid data for that day. Because the data we show is based on sampling, same-day edits can affect accuracy, so we prevent numbers from being shown unless the data they're based on is stable.
  • Auctions occur at the individual ad level and ad set level data is aggregated using sampled data for ad sets with at least 500 impressions.
• Auction Competition Change: The rate at which auction competition changed on a given day relative to the competitiveness of your own Paced Auction Bid. This change is considered significant if it's over 20%. We determine the change in auction competition by calculating the bid you would have needed to win the auctions that were just out of your reach (the cheapest 1% of auctions you lost). We call this a "competitive bid." The competitive bid for a given day is compared to the average competitive bid of the previous three days. This metric is calculated using sampled data from ad sets with at least 500 impressions.

What should I do with this information?

Bear in mind that competition can affect performance in different ways depending on how competitive you are. For example: If our delivery system was pacing your bid down to get you more results and then competition increased, you may see an increased cost per result. This is because, when competition increased, we may have had to start entering your full bid into auctions. However, if we were already entering your full bid into auctions, and competition increased, you may see less delivery rather than cost increases. This is because we can't increase your bid to try to win these more competitive auctions, and thus can't show your ads as much.

If your performance is affected by increasing competition in the auction, consider:

• Raising your bid to keep up with the increased competition
• Continuing to observe performance, knowing that you may see higher costs per result, lower spend or fewer results, until competition decreases again
• Pausing your ad set and restarting it a few days later to see if competition has decreased

* Nguồn: Facebook