Placement — is the place within an advertising platform where the user sees your ad.
Simply put, when you launch advertising on Facebook, Instagram or TikTok, you can choose exactly where it will appear: in the news feed, vertical Stories and Reels, search results or on third-party partner websites. The same advertising offer can be shown in several placements at once, adapting the format of images or videos for each one.
Why placements are needed in traffic arbitrage
Choosing ad placements helps manage advertising campaign results:
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Budget optimization: different placements produce different costs per result and may differ in traffic quality. Analyzing these metrics helps redistribute the budget in favor of more effective placements.
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Creative adaptation: different formats require different layouts. A vertical video is launched in Stories or Reels, while a square or horizontal one — in the feed.
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Testing setups: affiliate marketers often separate campaigns by placement to understand where the audience responds better to the offer and disable ineffective campaigns in time.
Main types of placements
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Feed: advertising posts that users see while scrolling through the main feed of social networks or platforms.
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Stories and short videos (Stories / Reels / Shorts): full-screen vertical formats.
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In-app advertising (In-App / App Placement): banners or full-screen videos inside mobile applications.
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Search: showing ads by keywords next to search results on the platform.
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Partner networks (Audience Network / Display Network): showing ads on thousands of third-party websites and in partner applications of the advertising network.
Important: advertising platforms often offer automatic placements, where algorithms decide where it is more profitable to show ads. However, in many campaigns, media buyers configure placements manually to control traffic and filter out platforms that do not produce results.
