A Tour through the New Facebook Ads Manager

Recently, Facebook began rolling out its new and improved advertising dashboard. To the delight of marketers everywhere, the dashboard overhaul has included many features that the interface desperately needed.

In the past, finding specific data was a sluggish process. Even worse, the organizational structure made finding specific ads difficult, especially for large campaigns with many ads.

Today, we’ll walk you through a few of the improvements to the Facebook Ad dashboard and discuss how they can help marketers find data faster.

Improved Account Structure with Ad Sets

This is, without question, the biggest change to the Facebook dashboard. Marketers with knowledge of the Google AdWords’ organizational structure will find this update familiar. In the past, Facebook has relied on two levels of organization for accounts, which consist of a “Campaign” level that contained multiple ads in the “Ad” level.

What Facebook has done is create a third level in the middle, called the “Ad Set,” which allows users to group ads based on targeting parameters within a campaign and ultimately results in a better sense of organization. Diving into a campaign no longer brings users to a long list of ads. Now, ads can be separated into groups based on demographics, geographic information, and interests.

With the inclusion of Ad Sets, marketers can look forward to a less cluttered, more structured experience within the Facebook Ad dashboard.

Budgets Tied to Ad Sets

By expanding on the new Ad Sets, Facebook has changed how you manage the budget within an account. In the past, budgets were set at the “Campaign” level. This meant that the amount spent on ads within a campaign was in the hands of Facebook.

Facebook has now given a little power back to marketers by allowing them to set the budget at the “Ad Set” level instead of the “Campaign” level. This allows users to tie specific budgets to specific ads without having to create multiple campaigns.

While this change may seem small, it plays a huge role in making sure the marketer has control over what is spent on a specific ad, without sacrificing account organization.

Customizable Reporting

While the change in reporting has been out for a little longer than the other changes we’ve discussed, it’s worth mentioning because of the  role it plays in finding data faster. In the past, there were only specific reports that could be created (such as “Advertising Performance” and “Actions by Impression Time”).  If the user needed a combination of information from different reports, both reports had to be downloaded and manually combined.

Once again, Facebook has taken a page out of Google AdWords’ book and has allowed users to create customizable reports. Any metric can be added or taken away, which leaves a report that is tailored to the user’s needs. Facebook’s new reporting tool does a great job in making data accessible and easy to find. 

Customized Date Ranges

One of my personal favorite Facebook changes is giving users the ability to check data within the dashboard for any time period. This could be done in the past, but it required users to create a report. Within the dashboard, marketers were restricted to “Today”, “7 days” from a specific date, and “28 days” from a specific date. This made finding data based on an exact timeframe a hassle.

With the new changes rolling out, users will now notice that time options are similar to other popular PPC dashboard. Options such as “Yesterday,” “Last Month,” and more are now available, along with the ability to choose custom start and end dates. This much need addition makes the Facebook dashboard significantly easier to use. 

New Ways to Create Ads

The last noticeable improvement implemented by Facebook is the way in which ads are created within the dashboard. In the past, users were forced to create one ad at a time, which was a slow and tedious process.

The biggest feature for ad creation to come from the update is the ability to create multiple ads at once. Users can create up to six versions of the same ad with different images. The only downside to this is that the text will need to remain the same for each ad. Even with that minor gripe, this still improves ad creation time within the dashboard.

That being said, this new feature doesn’t match up to what Facebook’s own Power Editor can do. The most powerful tool in the editor is the ability to duplicate ads, which is a feature not found on the dashboard. Being able to copy and tweak ads to create new ads saves a significant amount of time in ad creation.

While the new features to ad creation are a welcome addition, marketers should still continue to look to the Power Editor when creating new ads. With more features and a quicker, more efficient process, Power Editor will continue as the king of Facebook Ad creation.

Conclusion

To some, the overhaul to the Facebook Ad dashboard can be a little daunting. Taking the time to explore the changes, however, reveals what a breath of fresh air these new features are. With one big update, Facebook has made their dashboard cleaner and easier to use.

This update has been a long time coming, and I am glad to say that it is finally here.