Placement
The specific surface an ad is shown on: a feed, Stories, Reels, Marketplace, or a third-party app.
One ad set can deliver across dozens of surfaces across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and the Audience Network. Left on automatic, Meta distributes the budget across them however it judges best.
Why it matters for HVAC
Account-level averages hide the answer. A cost per lead that looks acceptable in aggregate is frequently one strong placement subsidising one terrible one, and the terrible one is usually Audience Network.
Creative behaves differently by surface too. A video shot for a feed, cropped automatically to a vertical Story, often loses the thing that made it work.
How it is measured
Break performance down by publisher platform first, then by placement. Compare booking rate rather than cost per lead, because the cheapest placements are frequently the worst ones and the cost figure points the wrong way.
A worked example
An account shows $46 cost per lead overall. Split by placement: Facebook feed $58 booking at 11%, Instagram feed $61 booking at 9%, Audience Network $19 booking at 1%. The cheap placement is dragging the average down while contributing almost nothing, and excluding it raises the reported cost per lead and lowers the real cost per job.
These figures are invented to show the arithmetic. They describe no real business.
Where this is demonstrated
The Creative production pillar scores every listed agency on what they document here, and gives you the questions that tell you which one you are being sold.