How the right column placement works
The right column is the strip of ad slots down the right-hand side of Facebook when the site is viewed on a computer. It exists only on desktop, so it disappears entirely on phones and in the app. The unit is small: an image, a short headline, and little room for the body copy that carries an ad in the feed.
You do not buy it separately. It is one of the placements available inside an ordinary Meta ad set, either included automatically when Advantage+ placements is left on, or ticked deliberately under manual placements. Because the slot sits beside the content rather than inside it, people scroll past it in peripheral vision rather than reading it in sequence, and Meta crops your creative to suit that shape.
Why the right column matters
Its economics are different from the feed. Attention on a sidebar is shallow, so demand for the slot is lower and the cost of an impression tends to be cheaper than an in-feed impression. That makes it useful for jobs where being seen repeatedly at low cost is the point, such as reminding people who already know you, rather than jobs that need someone to read an argument.
It also matters for how you read reports. A campaign that quietly spends much of its budget in the sidebar can show a healthy-looking impression count and a poor result count, because impressions there are easy to buy and hard to convert.
Where the right column goes wrong
The first problem is creative. Text-heavy images and long headlines that work in the feed become unreadable once cropped into a small sidebar tile, and a video whose meaning arrives late is wasted in a slot people barely glance at.
The second is geography and device. In markets like Nepal, where Facebook use is overwhelmingly on phones, the desktop-only nature of the slot means it can deliver very little no matter what you set. Advertisers sometimes blame the placement for weak numbers when the real answer is that almost nobody in the target audience was on a computer.
What to do about it
Leave placements broad to begin with, then apply the placement breakdown in Ads Manager and read the sidebar’s spend, results and cost per thousand impressions next to the Facebook feed. Compare cost per result, not click volume, because a cheap click from a sidebar often ends in an immediate bounce.
If the slot earns its place, tailor the asset to it rather than letting the feed image be squeezed in: a clear product or face, a very short headline, and no small print. If it does not, exclude it in that ad set only, not as a blanket rule across the account. Sensible placement settings are part of how I structure Facebook advertising campaigns.