Glossary · reach-and-delivery
What is Dark post?
A dark post is an ad that never appears on your page's timeline — only the audience you targeted sees it in their feed. Meta calls the underlying object an unpublished page post. Nothing is hidden in a sinister sense; the ad carries your page name and the usual reporting options. The point is housekeeping. You can run eight versions of one message without filling your followers' feeds with eight near-identical posts, and you can send an offer to one segment without every other customer discovering that someone got a better price than they did.
What does Dark post mean for a business in Pakistan?
The obvious local use is price segmentation. Wholesale rates for shopkeepers, a discount for one housing society, a student rate, a bulk offer for corporate clients — none of these should sit on a public page where every walk-in customer will screenshot it and ask why they paid full price. Dark posts keep the offer with the people it was priced for.
A worked example
A Raja Bazaar crockery importer runs six dark posts at PKR 1,500 each, all carrying wholesale rates, targeted only at a custom audience built from 2,900 shopkeeper numbers. About 3,100 people see the ads in total, 47 shopkeepers message, and no retail customer on the page ever sees the wholesale price list.
Terms that go with this one
These come up in the same conversations and are worth reading together.
- Boosted postboost / post boost karnaA boosted post is an existing post turned into an ad through the simplified 'Boost' button, using a stripped-down set of controls. You get a rough…
- CreativecreativeThe creative is the thing a person actually sees and hears — the video or image, the first frame, the words burned on screen, the voice-over, the…
- Custom audiencecustom audienceA custom audience is a defined list of specific people you already have some connection with, assembled either from data you upload or from activity…
- Ad setad setAn ad set is the middle layer of a Meta campaign, sitting between the campaign and the individual ads. The campaign holds the goal, the ads hold the…
- A/B testA/B testAn A/B test compares two versions of something that differ in exactly one element, so that any difference in results can be blamed on that element.…
Dark post — quick answers
What does Dark post mean?
A dark post is an ad that never appears on your page's timeline — only the audience you targeted sees it in their feed. Meta calls the underlying object an unpublished page post.
Dark post ko Urdu mein kya kehte hain?
ڈارک پوسٹ — though in practice almost everyone in Pakistan says "dark post". The obvious local use is price segmentation.
Why does Dark post matter for a business in Pakistan?
The obvious local use is price segmentation. Wholesale rates for shopkeepers, a discount for one housing society, a student rate, a bulk offer for corporate clients — none of these should sit on a public page where every walk-in customer will screenshot it and ask why they paid full price. Dark posts keep the offer with the people it was priced for.
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