Facebook Ads Manager is an ad management tool to make, edit and analyze paid promotional Facebook campaigns. Facebook recently combined Ads Manager and Power Editor into one platform to make it easier to create and monitor ads campaigns across multiple advertising platforms owned by Facebook, including Instagram ads.
What Is Facebook Ads Manager?
Facebook Ads Manager is one of those simple yet functional tools that won’t really impress until you’ve sat down and counted the hours that you’ll save when you have it at your disposal. Developed as a Firefox Extension, it sits quietly on your browser and integrates with the native Facebook Ad Manager.
The tool automates the process of creating, copying and launching campaigns. When opened, it will appear as a sidebar in your browser with a variety of options. Most will look familiar from the basic Facebook interface.
At the press of a play button, Facebook Ads Manager is capable of spitting out dozens, hundreds or even thousands of ad variations. It does this by simply mixing and matching the parameters that you’ve chosen for your creatives. I’ll touch on why this is so helpful in a minute, but just ask yourself. How many hours have you wasted sitting at your desk and submitting tiny variations of the same ad over…and over…and over again? It’s easy to spend an hour launching one campaign only to have an intern auto-disapprove every single god damn ad because of “too much skin”.
Does Facebook let you replace the image and resubmit all of them at the click of a button? No, the cretins require you to access each creative and make individual changes. To summarize, Facebook Ads Manager can save you this pain. But far from being a mere anger management – slash damage limitation – plugin, I’ve found Facebook Ads Manager to be a vital ingredient to a successful campaign.
How Can I Use It To Make Money?
Going back to the mixing and matching formula, let’s take an example of a real life campaign. I once had a dating ad on Facebook that was cutting a small loss and not quite delivering profitability, but I knew that it was a strong concept and that with a little optimization it would probably bring home good money.
My original ad creatives were targeting groups of males within 6 year age brackets. So I had one creative hitting 18-24, another 25-31 and so on. I used the same group of ad texts and images on each demographic and the closest I could ever get to profit was on the weekend where my CTR was naturally higher.
Thanks to Facebook Ads Manager, I was able to break those ad groups in to dozens of small clusters and really analyze where each creative was succeeding or failing. I launched 60-70 new ads in a matter of minutes, setting the manager to test subtle variations of each ad across much smaller age brackets. With a little help from my best friend automation, I was able to divide the ad groups in to one year age brackets and not want to kill myself.
It really took me by surprise how the same ad creative could perform so differently with a user just 2 years younger, or how blondes and brunettes attracted more clicks with subtly different text variations. I would never have had the time nor patience to track these performance quirks if it wasn’t for the automation machine behind Facebook Ads Manager.
If there’s one thing I’ve discovered with experience, it’s that often you have a profitable Facebook campaign on your hands and don’t even know it. You’ve got too many bad apples in your basket. Too many harmful demographics hurting the profitability of that one killer creative. With Facebook Ads Manager, you can really drill down and get the absolute maximum from your campaigns. That’s how you use it to make your money.
What Are The Risks Involved?
The developer behind the tool recommends that you submit no more than 200 ads in one session. Facebook has been known to crack down on accounts that have been flagged for excessive automation. I say excessive automation because there’s always going to be a tipping point. I can’t see Facebook having a problem in letting a customer use technology to automate the creation of a campaign.
But you’re probably going to ruffle feathers if you think this is Badder Adder and start launching a new campaign every 5 minutes. Those interns have gotta have their lunch breaks and I can’t see them being too pleased if you’re sitting in their inbox every time they blink an eye.
I can’t imagine you would need more than 100 ads to grab some incredibly useful test data from your campaign. And even if that’s not enough for you, just wait a little while and run another batch. The main risk with Facebook Ads Manager, as is so often the case, is that it falls in to the hands of a bumbling clustertard who thinks technology is his bitch. Exploit the tool recklessly and you’ll get shut down.
Facebook Ads Manager Pricing Options
For what the tool is, a simple browser extension, Facebook Ads Manager is priced quite highly at $199.99. If you’re a beginner with minimal cash to invest, I’d advise you spend that money on raw testing rather than splashing out on fancy tools. But for intermediate marketers and those who’ve spent a fair amount on Facebook in the past, $199.99 is the price of taking the next step and upping your game. It’s possible to get by without the tool, but what price do you put on your time? How many campaigns have you launched that never fulfilled their potential?
All future upgrades are free with the initial purchase. You don’t have to worry about your software becoming obsolete if Facebook decide to overhaul their interface, which they seem to do all the time. There’s no trial version available, but there is a 60 day money back guarantee for your sampling pleasure.
Overall Thoughts
I’m a fan. I’ve got thumbs up for any tool that detaches me from the heartbreaking process of dealing with Facebook interns. But especially one that can uncover so many hidden gaps in a market. By combining Ads Manager with your tracking software of choice, you can really fast-track your progress on the Facebook platform and cut through the crap to find ads that just work. There’s no explanation for why, and sometimes the logic is backwards. To be successful as an affiliate, I’ve learned to automatically disregard what I think is going to work…and just test everything.
